About National Institute for Communicable Disease Control and Prevention

National Institute for Communicable Disease Control and Prevention

The National Institute for Communicable Disease Control and Prevention, abbreviated ICDC, is the institute of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention responsible for bacterial infectious diseases. Tracing its origins to the Epidemiology Research Institute established in 1953 under the then Ministry of Health, the Beijing-based institute conducts national surveillance of bacterial and fungal diseases and research on the pathogens that cause them — plague, cholera and other bacterial infections, food-borne diseases, and the infections carried by ticks, fleas, animals and other vectors. It is, in effect, China's national reference institution for the bacterial half of the infectious disease world.

Origins in the Epidemiology Research Institute of 1953

China CDC's official profile states that the ICDC was formerly the Epidemiology Research Institute established in 1953 under the then Ministry of Health. The date places its birth in the first years of the People's Republic, when epidemic disease was among the new state's most urgent problems and epidemiology was being organised as a national discipline. The institute's scholarly lineage runs through the Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, whose researchers compiled the multi-volume history of plague spread in China published in 1981 — a work still cited as a primary source for historical plague surveillance data, and one that connects the modern institute to the documentary record of China's plague foci.

When China CDC was formed in 2002 from the former Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, the institute took its present place and name within the new centre, as the national institute for communicable — in practice, bacterial and related — disease control and prevention, complementing the separate national institute for viral diseases.

Scope: the bacterial and vector-borne world

The official profile defines the institute's territory precisely. The ICDC mainly conducts research on, and provides professional support for, the prevention and control of plague, cholera and other bacterial infectious diseases. Its work covers food-borne diseases; infections caused by Rickettsia, Ehrlichia, Anaplasma, Bartonella, Spirochaeta, Chlamydia, Mycoplasma and Coxiella — the largely tick-, flea-, louse- and animal-associated bacterial genera responsible for diseases such as typhus, anaplasmosis, Q fever and Lyme-related and relapsing fevers; animal-origin pathogens; newly discovered pathogens; and outbreak investigation and vector control. It also conducts research on antibiotic resistance, hospital-related infection, bacterial infectious disease laboratory surveillance technology, genome epidemiology and bioinformatics.

The list is a map of how bacterial disease actually reaches people: through food and water, through the bites of arthropod vectors, through contact with animals, through hospitals, and through the slow evolution of drug resistance. An institute charged with all of those routes must combine field epidemiology, microbiology, entomology and genomics — and ICDC's structure reflects that combination.

National surveillance of bacterial and fungal diseases

Surveillance is the institute's first operational duty. China CDC's statement of the ICDC's functions charges it with carrying out national surveillance of bacterial and fungal diseases, taking responsibility for the formulation of surveillance plans, the operation and management of surveillance systems, the digitisation of those systems and the analysis of surveillance data. It formulates the technical plans and guidelines for the prevention and control of bacterial and fungal diseases, and provides technical guidance, assessment and evaluation for that work nationwide.

In practice this makes ICDC the analytical centre of a national system: provincial and local CDCs detect and report cases and isolates, while the national institute designs the protocols they follow, receives and analyses the resulting data, and identifies the patterns — a rising resistance rate, an unusual cluster, a pathogen appearing outside its known range — that require action. Its plague research illustrates the depth involved: ICDC scientists based at its Changping, Beijing campus have analysed more than 3,400 human plague cases and nearly 5,000 Yersinia pestis isolates from humans, host animals and vector insects across the natural plague foci of Yunnan between 1950 and 2020, work published in the international journal Microbiology Spectrum, providing the evidence base for plague prevention strategy in China's remaining foci.

Laboratory reference systems and drug resistance

The institute's fourth and fifth functions concern the laboratory backbone of disease control. ICDC establishes and manages a national reference system for laboratory monitoring and diagnosis of bacterial and fungal diseases, monitors drug resistance of important pathogens, and participates in monitoring and control of iatrogenic — healthcare-associated — infections. A reference system matters because diagnosis across thousands of laboratories is only comparable if methods, reagents and interpretation are anchored to a national standard; the reference institute confirms difficult identifications, characterises unusual strains, and tells the system what it is actually seeing.

Its cholera research shows the genomic end of that work. ICDC researchers sequenced the genomes of Vibrio cholerae strains isolated in China between 1961 and 2010 and compared them with published genomes from the global seventh cholera pandemic, establishing how the pandemic lineages entered and spread within China — research published in PLOS Genetics with the institute's State Key Laboratory among its affiliations. Genome epidemiology of that kind converts a reference collection of stored isolates into a history of an epidemic, and into early warning of how a pathogen is changing.

The State Key Laboratory and the WHO vector centre

Two affiliated research centres mark the institute's national and international standing. The State Key Laboratory for Communicable Disease Prevention and Control — also rendered in publications as the State Key Laboratory of Infectious Disease Prevention and Control — is China's state key laboratory in this field, hosted at the institute and appearing as the affiliation on its plague, cholera and other pathogen research. State key laboratory status designates a facility as the national centre of excellence for its discipline, funded and evaluated accordingly.

The second centre is the WHO Collaborating Centre for Vector Surveillance and Management. Vector surveillance — the systematic watching of the fleas, ticks, mosquitoes and other arthropods that transmit disease, and of the animal hosts that maintain pathogens in nature — is one of the institute's founding skills, inseparable from plague work, in which the ecology of rodents and their fleas determines human risk. The WHO designation recognises that expertise internationally and makes the institute a reference point for vector work beyond China. The ICDC's own functions include surveillance, investigation and control of vectors and animal hosts of infectious diseases, conducted as a standing national responsibility rather than a project.

Emergency response and outbreak investigation

When a major outbreak of a bacterial or fungal disease occurs, the institute is part of the response. Its functions include carrying out and participating in emergency responses to major outbreaks and public health emergencies, and building up the relevant technological know-how in advance — the protocols, diagnostics and trained teams that an emergency will need before it happens. Outbreak investigation is written into its core remit, and its combination of field epidemiology with reference laboratory capability is designed for the defining questions of an outbreak: what is the pathogen, where is it coming from, and how is it spreading?

Training, global health and the wider system

The institute's remaining functions complete a national institute's profile: technical training, postgraduate education, health education and public exchanges on the prevention and control of bacterial and fungal diseases, vectors and host animals; and participation in global health programmes in the same fields, with international cooperation and exchanges. As a China CDC institute it also accomplishes other tasks entrusted by the centre. Its researchers publish in the international literature — in journals of the American Society for Microbiology and the Public Library of Science among others — under affiliations that keep the institute's name attached to China's bacterial disease data in the global scientific record.

Significance

Bacterial diseases are the oldest epidemic threat China faces — plague and cholera shaped its public health history — and they remain live risks, joined by food-borne outbreaks, tick-borne infections and antimicrobial resistance. The National Institute for Communicable Disease Control and Prevention is the institution China maintains to watch that whole frontier: heir to the Epidemiology Research Institute of 1953, operator of national bacterial and fungal surveillance, keeper of the reference laboratories and the State Key Laboratory, and WHO collaborating centre for the vectors that carry many of these diseases to human beings.