In 2024, the World Recorded 301 Pandemic-Prone and Epidemic-Prone Disease Outbreaks. Excluding COVID-19, That Is 159 Outbreaks, Nearly Double the 95 Reported in 2019, the Year Before the Pandemic Began.

Every individual outbreak, whether it is the Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that CliniScope Weekly covered in Issue 8, or a dengue surge in Brazil, or an H5N1 spillover into dairy cattle, tends to get covered as its own isolated story. This paper does something different. It steps back and asks a structural question: across an entire year, globally, how many outbreaks actually occurred, where did they happen, and what does the pattern tell us about where the world's disease surveillance and prevention resources should go? Using an open, systematically maintained global dataset built from World Health Organization Disease Outbreak News reports, Torres Munguía and Martínez-Zarzoso provide the closest thing global health has to an annual outbreak census, and the 2024 numbers describe a world that has not returned to its pre-pandemic baseline, it has settled into a new and higher one.

The authors analyzed the 2024 update of the Global Dataset of Pandemic-Prone and Epidemic-Prone Disease Outbreaks, a structured database built by systematically extracting and coding information from WHO's Disease Outbreak News reports, which document individual public health events of international concern. The dataset covers more than 230 countries and territories from January 1996 onward, tracking outbreak counts by disease, country, and year. For this paper, the authors focused specifically on characterizing the 2024 outbreak landscape: total outbreak counts compared to prior years, the specific pathogens responsible for the largest share of events, and the geographic distribution of outbreaks relative to each region's share of the global population.

An estimated 301 pandemic-prone and epidemic-prone outbreaks occurred worldwide in 2024. That figure represents an 18.3% decline from 2023, but it remains well above pre-pandemic levels: in 2019, the year before COVID-19 emerged, only 95 outbreaks were recorded globally. Excluding COVID-19 itself from the 2024 count, 159 outbreaks were still recorded, nearly double the 2019 total. Approximately 90% of all 2024 outbreaks were associated with just five categories: COVID-19, dengue, yellow fever, Oropouche virus disease, and influenza linked to zoonotic or pandemic strains. The data show a clear shift in outbreak character since the height of the pandemic: fewer countries were reporting COVID-19-specific events, while more countries reported outbreaks of viral diseases transmitted by vectors, principally mosquitoes. In sub-Saharan Africa specifically, the number of affected countries more than doubled, from 9 in 2023 to 19 in 2024, with new outbreak reports emerging from Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Eritrea, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Mayotte, Niger, Réunion, and Senegal. Geographically, sub-Saharan Africa combined with the Latin America and Caribbean subregion, together home to just 23.3% of the global population, accounted for approximately 57% of all outbreaks recorded in 2024. Sub-Saharan Africa alone has been the site of nearly 32% of every outbreak recorded globally in the entire dataset since 1996.

• —The underlying dataset is built from WHO Disease Outbreak News reports, which are not produced as a standardized statistical surveillance tool. They are written for public communication purposes, and their format, level of detail, and thresholds for what counts as a reportable outbreak have shifted somewhat over the nearly 30-year period the full dataset covers, which the original dataset authors acknowledge introduces some inconsistency across years.
• —Because reporting relies on countries notifying WHO and WHO subsequently publishing a Disease Outbreak News report, countries with weaker surveillance infrastructure may systematically underreport outbreaks relative to countries with more robust detection systems, potentially understating the true burden in the lowest-resource settings, the opposite direction of the disparity already documented.
• —This is a descriptive analysis of outbreak counts and does not adjust for outbreak severity, size, or duration. A count of "one outbreak" could represent a contained cluster of a dozen cases or a sustained epidemic affecting tens of thousands of people, and both count identically in the headline totals presented here.
• —The 2024 data represents a single year. While the comparison to 2019 and to the broader 1996 to 2024 trend provides useful context, a single year's fluctuation, an 18.3% decline from 2023, should not be over-interpreted as evidence of a durable improving trend without additional years of follow-up data.

The world is not experiencing occasional, isolated disease outbreaks returning to a pre-pandemic normal. It is operating at a persistently elevated baseline of outbreak activity, nearly double the pre-COVID rate even after excluding COVID-19 itself, and that burden falls overwhelmingly on regions least equipped to absorb it. Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, with less than a quarter of the world's population, carried more than half of 2024's outbreaks. The DRC's record-setting Ebola outbreak this year is not a freak event happening in isolation. It is what this data predicts will keep happening, in the same places, until global investment in surveillance and health system capacity in the highest-burden regions catches up to the actual scale of the risk.