“A group of health organizations [on Wednesday] launched a new international consortium to better prepare the clinical research community to respond to the next pandemic or other emerging health threat,” CIDRAP News reports (Schnirring, 12/7). “The International Severe Acute Respiratory Infection Consortium (ISARIC) is a global collaboration of over 20 hospital-based clinical research networks … aimed at ensuring the clinical researchers have in place the necessary open access protocols and data-sharing processes and have considered the ethical issues that will allow them to respond to rapidly emerging diseases with epidemic or pandemic potential, such as the recent pandemic H1N1 influenza and SARS outbreaks and potentially other rapidly emerging public health threats,” according to a Wellcome Trust press release.

The consortium, created by the Wellcome Trust and the U.K. Medical Research Council, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Inserm, Li Ka Shing Oxford Global Health Programme and the Singapore Ministry of Health, was launched at the annual meeting of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in Philadelphia, Pa., the press release notes (12/8).