Rebecca Katz's team has filled a former microbiology lab at Georgetown University with data dashboards, massive television screens, and time-zone clocks spanning North America—transforming it into something that looks more like an intelligence agency war room than a public health office. But this is where the Health Security Operations Center (HSOC) will spend the next two months doing something that's never been attempted before: a non-governmental entity mounting real-time infectious disease surveillance for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
The scale of the challenge is staggering. With 48 teams competing across 16 host cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico through July 19, millions of fans and athletes will converge on stadiums, hotels, and fan gathering spots. That mass movement of people from across the globe creates fertile conditions for infectious disease outbreaks—and no one has mounted a surveillance operation quite like this before.
"We're doing something that's never been done before because it's never been done by a non-governmental entity," Katz, who directs the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown in Washington, D.C., explained in a university news release. The HSOC is pulling data from diverse sources: air travel logs, social media trends, and, perhaps most critically, municipal wastewater surveillance. Those sewage samples should alert the team to viral surges up to a week before patients show up at emergency departments—a crucial early warning system.
The diseases on their radar are serious ones. Measles cases have already been reported in every state that will host a World Cup team or match. COVID-19 remains a concern. So do norovirus and mosquito-borne illnesses like dengue. William Goedel, an associate professor of epidemiology at Brown University's School of Public Health in Providence, Rhode Island, has complemented Georgetown's work with a digital tracking tool that maps team training sites, hotels, match venues, and major fan gathering spots. This allows public health departments to see exactly where crowds are congregating and, in the case of an outbreak, where they're heading next.
What makes the HSOC's approach genuinely innovative is its proactive coordination strategy. If disease surveillance detects a health risk in one host city, the team immediately notifies officials in the next city on the travel itinerary. If New York detects something concerning and the team knows fans are heading to Seattle for the next match, that data travels with them. Local hospitals can prepare for specific illnesses before a wave of travelers arrives.
The HSOC is also creating country profiles for each host city, detailing which diseases are prevalent in the home nations of visiting teams. A team from a region with dengue, for instance, prompts local officials to assess whether U.S. mosquitoes in that area could carry and transmit the virus. It's the kind of granular, forward-thinking preparation that could mean the difference between a contained situation and a widespread outbreak.
This two-month operation is being carefully documented. The HSOC and Brown's efforts are meant to serve as a model for future mass-gathering events—including the 2028 Olympics. In a world where large crowds and global travel create constant disease risks, this Washington war room represents a new way of thinking about public health security.