With just three weeks to go before the Olympic flame is officially lit in London, the UK’s Health Protection Agency (HPA) announced this week that it is “Games ready”, with a rapid-response system in place to keep spectators and athletes healthy. Over the course of the 16-day event, the public health body will pinpoint and respond to any emerging health hazards or infectious disease outbreaks that may occur among the 11 million ticketholders and 15,000 athletes expected to descend upon the British capital.
Leading the effort will be the Olympics lead health director Brian McCloskey, who is also the HPA’s regional director for London. A family doctor by training, McCloskey played a major role in the agency’s emergency response to the London tube bombings in 2005 and helped craft the public health preparedness guidelines for the 2004 Olympics in Athens. Ahead of this year’s Summer Games, McCloskey spoke with Nature Medicine about the HPA’s key preparations and overarching public health challenges for the 30th Olympiad.
Which infectious diseases will you be tracking during the Games?
We will monitor all infectious diseases, but the main ones that will likely be an issue for us will be gastrointestinal diseases such as food poisoning and infectious diseases such as measles. There have been measles outbreaks in Europe and in UK in the past couple of years and those haven’t gone away.