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where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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This is Lindsay Smith-Rogers.

Today, the creation of a national weather service for public health threats. Dr. Dylan

George is the director of the new Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics at the Center

for Disease Control and Prevention. He joins Dr. Josh Sharfstein to talk about what's new at the center

and what to expect during this year's respiratory viral season. Let's listen. Dr. Dylan, George, thank you so

much for joining me in public health on call to talk about this new center at CDC and how it's going.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to be with you. So where do things stand? Well, just as a

reminder for most people, the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics is one of the newest centers within CDC.

It doesn't happen very frequently that you create a whole new center at CDC.

But our mission is to empower people to save lives and protect communities from health threats.

And how we're doing that, how we're trying to create that vision of the

world that we're seeing is that through harnessing cutting-edge analytics, generate better

analytical insights to improve response capabilities for public health emergencies.

That's how we're trying to do, that's our secret sauce. That's how we're trying to actually

affect this mission going forward. And it's been exciting to kind of like see that mission coming to life. Now, I kind of thought of it. You could tell me if this is the wrong way to think about it, but simply as building a little bit of a national weather service but for public health threats. Is that fair, unfair? No, I think that's a really strong analogy because, you know, it's like before we had the weather service, we were battered around by severe weather events in a lot of different ways. And that's what we're trying to do right now. It's like we don't ask academics to stop their day job to help us anticipate where a hurricane is going to hit the United States. We have people that are, that's their day job, is to figure

out how to save people from hurricanes. This is what we're doing as well. We're creating

that kind of weather service for infectious diseases and other health emergencies.

So tell me about the kinds of health emergencies. Infectious diseases, so I guess pandemics are

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