A global dataset of pandemic- and epidemic-prone disease outbreaks

Here can be found a new dataset of infectious disease outbreaks collected from the Disease Outbreak News and the Coronavirus Dashboard produced by the World Health Organization. The unit of analysis in the database is an outbreak that happens when a country has at least one case of a specific disease during a particular year. Thus, a specific country cannot have two outbreaks related to the same disease in the same year (but can have more than one outbreak of different diseases in the same year). Moreover, a country can only have more than one outbreaks of the same disease, if and only if they refer to different years. Target applications could focus on combining our data with other information sources to study, for instance, the link between , geographical, environmental, globalization, and/or socioeconomic factors with disease outbreaks.