image credit- shutterstock
The Ministry of Health (MoH), Singapore government, will establish a new Statutory Board, the Communicable Diseases Agency (CDA), on 1 April 2025.
CDA will consolidate public health functions for the detection, prevention and control of infectious diseases, previously distributed under MoH headquarters, the Health Promotion Board, and National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID). It will focus on preventing disease spread through public education, vaccination policies, and infection prevention and control measures; leading and coordinating public health preparedness efforts, working with various stakeholders to build sectoral readiness against infectious disease crises, and safeguarding national interests such as vaccine and therapeutics development and access.
The Agency will also strengthen surveillance capabilities, including exploring the use of new modalities of surveillance to supplement traditional surveillance approaches, and explore data analytics and artificial intelligence to enhance our ability to make sense of large volumes of data; to investigate and respond to cases and outbreaks of infectious diseases, provide policy and scientific recommendations, and implement public health and social measures during a pandemic.
To enable these functions, CDA will conduct and coordinate public health research, translating findings into actionable policies. Additionally, CDA will engage in international cooperation to stay abreast of global developments, share best practices, and enable swift responses to evolving disease situations worldwide.
The formation of CDA will allow the government to quickly respond to disease outbreaks as one concerted public health effort, and play a pivotal role in safeguarding Singapore from infectious disease threats.
Professor Vernon Lee will be appointed Chief Executive Officer of CDA from 1 April 2025. He will relinquish his current role as Executive Director of National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID) on the same day.
