Hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) seldom makes headlines. The 2026 Asia-Pacific season deserves a closer look anyway. Several countries in APAC are running an unusually large year, with a mix of enterovirus types circulating. As of the end of June this year, Vietnam had recorded 57,599 cases and 10 deaths, a 96.7% increase on the same period in 2025. China logged 538,675 cases over the same six months, roughly double the 263,696 reported in the first half of 2025.

In this post, I use Conway’s Law to explain why departments keep building their own systems — and share a checklist for deciding whether you should. Again!? You wanna build another new system? If you are a data scientist working closely with IT team, you have probably heard this complaint. “Why does everyone in the house want to build their own new system?” — an IT manager said this to me.

In my recent brief to the Philippines Ministry of Health on 10 June 2026, I mapped out the stake of evolving global AI surveillance landscape and Taiwan’s blueprint for an AI-first roadmap to health surveillance. For this post, I have highlighted six pivotal global advancements that are currently reshaping the field. Download my public-version deck here: AI-enabled Intelligent Transformation of International Outbreak Monitoring. By mid-2026, agentic and generative AI are no longer just buzzwords—they are actively deployed across global epidemic intelligence systems.

In this post, I’ll share a step-by-step guide on how I leveraged Google Antigravity and Gemini 3.0 model to modernize a mission-critical workflow. This React-based application prototype transforms raw epidemic signals into a seamless, interactive geospatial narrative, reimagining how we visualize global health intelligence. Link to the application Global Outbreak Intelligence Hub and the Github repo Step by step guide: Prompt engineering in Antigravity In my first attempt, I manually drafted a Markdown file describing the app’s requirements.

This study was first presented in the Global Health session at the 2025 Taiwan Public Health Joint Annual Conference on 19 October 2025 in Taipei, Taiwan. The original slide deck has been adapted into this post, highlighting three key points: UNICEF’s Global Immunisation Budget Databases (GIBD), launched in June 2025, is an AI-driven breakthrough in immunisation financing. In LMICs, immunisation budget increases showed a positive link with DTP first-dose coverage.

I volunteer for the Taiwan Youth Initiatives in Europe (TYIE) and originally published this post on TYIE’s website, discussing : What is the WHO Pandemic Agreement? Why is the exclusion of Taiwan unjustified? The approval of the World Health Organization (WHO) Pandemic Agreement by the 78th World Health Assembly (WHA) Committee in May marks a landmark global commitment to fortify pandemic prevention, preparedness and response (PPR) capacities. The agreement aims to achieve the common interest of a more equitable and better prepared world to prevent, respond to and recover from pandemics.

Without Sustained Funding From the U.S., 75 Million Children May Go Unvaccinated in the Next Five Years. The New York Times reported in March that the U.S. planned to halt funding for select foreign programmes - including Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. The consequences could be dire, as many as 75 million children could miss vaccinations over the next five years, along with 1.2 million deaths from preventable diseases. It is part of a broader “America First” agenda that includes winding down USAID and withdrawing from the WHO.

This post aims to advance your Power BI skills by: Creating a sequence of sustained measures in a new table, rather than having random measures co-existing with variables. Updating longitudinal data when new data is routinely received. [Note that the data used in this post are examples, inspired by my work with the Immunisation Financing & Sustainability (IF&S) team at Gavi. The views expressed here are my own and do not represent those of my former employer, Gavi.

This post shares my work at the lovely Immunisation Financing & Sustainability (IF&S) team at Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Please note that views expressed here are my own and don’t represent the views of my employer, Gavi. It covers: Brief intro for Gavi’s Co-financing model 5 visual tips for portfolio management (some with R code), e.g. risk-assessment table and faceted pie An optimized data flow for a complex data ecosystem What is Co-financing Under Gavi’s Co-financing policy, countries share the costs of the vaccine programmes by directly co-procuring a portion of the vaccines and injection devices from a supplier or procurement agency to fulfill their co-financing requirements.

This post shares my poster presentation at the Vaccine Hesitancy Course held by the Croucher Foundation in August, 2024, Hong Kong. Download the poster here, which is the milestone of my thesis project at LSHTM. Introduction Global incidence of polio has decreased by 99% since 1988. Non-polio Acute Flaccid Paralysis (NPAFP) is the key indicator for the sensitivity of polio surveillance. While countries with circulating poliovirus consistently report NPAFP rates exceeding the gold-standard indicator*, it is not well-understood what rate should be expected.