Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. December 2, 2025. The Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA) has successfully concluded a two-day regional workshop in Trinidad and Tobago “Strengthening Vector Borne Disease (VBD) Surveillance through Data Quality, Nowcasting and Risk Matrix Application”. This workshop focused on strengthening VBD surveillance, improving the quality and timeliness of national data, and operationalising Early Warning Systems (EWS) across CARPHA Member States. The workshop cohesively brought together seventeen (17) participants from nine CARPHA Member States: Barbados, British Virgin Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Maarten, and Trinidad and Tobago and involved epidemiologists, national surveillance officers, statisticians and environmental health professionals.
“The same tools that help us anticipate dengue, chikungunya, malaria and other vector-borne threats are the tools that will help us detect and contain the next pandemic,” said Dr Lisa Indar, Executive Director, CARPHA. “By investing in better data, faster early warning and Caribbean tailored decision tools, we are helping our Member States move from reacting to outbreaks to staying one step ahead and protecting lives and livelihoods across the Region.”
Speaking at the workshop’s opening, Dr Horace Cox, Director of Surveillance, Disease Prevention and Control at CARPHA, highlighted the integral connection between VBD work and broader pandemic preparedness. “We do not know when the next pandemic will be, or what pathogen will cause it, but we do know that our environment is dynamic and the risks are increasing,” he said. “By strengthening data quality, risk assessment and real time analysis for vector borne diseases, and by co-designing these tools with our Member States, we are improving our resilience and building a more harmonised Caribbean response to whatever threats emerge.”
Leveraging further on the foundation established during the first workshop, held in August in Barbados that focused on operationalising Vector Borne Disease Early Warning Systems, this second session advanced the use of risk assessment matrices and introduced nowcasting technique. As a modern epidemiological approach, nowcasting adjusts for delays and gaps in vector borne disease surveillance data, providing a more complete and timely picture of transmission conditions. This in turn allows for earlier detection of trend shifts and supporting more reliable real time risk assessment.
Dr Brian Armour, Technical Advisor for the Pandemic Fund Project at CARPHA, underscored the importance of a Caribbean specific early warning approach. “Given our geography, size and dependence on tourism, an outbreak in one CARPHA Member State can rapidly become a regional event,” he noted. “Support from the Pandemic Fund is allowing us to design a regional, integrated early warning system that brings together indicator based, laboratory, tourism and event based data, so that countries can detect, notify and act faster on emerging vector borne and other public health threats.”
Over the two days, participants conducted hands on exercises using integrated epidemiological, entomological, climate and laboratory datasets, deepened their understanding of basic nowcasting models and their application to EWS, and mapped early warning outputs to national standard operating procedures (SOPs). These activities are expected to help Member States translate early warning signals into clear operational triggers such as enhanced surveillance, verification investigations, and rapid vector control. Countries also gained new capacity to identify which indicators are most relevant for inclusion in their national early warning models. This supports the development of more accurate, country tailored outputs and strengthens the standardisation of procedures so responses remain consistent as threat levels rise.
The workshop also showcased how VBD specific tools fit within CARPHA’s emerging regional, integrated early warning surveillance system, developed under the Pandemic Fund Project. Participants explored how national systems can interface with CARPHA’s platforms while maintaining data stewardship and sovereignty, and how improved timeliness metrics can reduce delays between detection, notification and action during public health events.
This initiative contributes directly to the objectives of CARPHA’s Pandemic Fund Project by strengthening comprehensive disease surveillance and EWS, enhancing workforce capabilities in data analysis and risk assessment, and supporting coordinated regional responses to vector borne and other epidemic prone diseases that could escalate to pandemic scale.
About CARPHA’s Pandemic Fund Project
CARPHA is the Executing Agency for its Pandemic Fund Project, with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) as the Implementing Entity. The goal of this Project, which spans from 2024 to 2026, is to Reduce the Public Health Impact of Pandemics in the Caribbean through Prevention, Preparedness, and Response (PPR). The objective is to support the reduction of the public health impact of pandemics in the Caribbean by building pandemic PPR surveillance and early warning systems, laboratory systems and workforce capacity, regionally at CARPHA and at country levels. This will reduce the transboundary spread of infectious diseases and improve regional and global health security. CARPHA is the beneficiary of the PF project, and CARPHA Member States are the participants. Learn more via CARPHA’s Pandemic Fund webpage.
