Themed issue on: Using Large Language models in outbreak response

Guest Editor: Albert Jan van Hoek, National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), The Netherlands

The epidemiological response to an outbreak requires fast and thorough action to maximise beneficial impact. Applying innovations that can make one or several steps of an outbreak investigation faster or more effective is therefore of huge interest to the public health community.

Recent developments of large language models (LLMs) offer such potential. Due to their language understanding capacities, they allow for a more intuitive and user-centric interaction with code and data, and could provide support to the end user in their local language. This enables a faster and better implementation of (new) techniques and a faster dissemination of results. 

For this special issue of Epidemiology & Infection we would like to invite papers that discuss, explore or evaluate the (potential) use of LLMs in any step of an epidemiological outbreaks investigation (See: Steps in an outbreak investigation). We hope to cover as many steps as possible. Please note that the use of LLMs in broadly related areas of epidemiological research of outbreaks may be also relevant for this special issue.

Please register your interest in submitting a manuscript to this special issue by contacting the editorial office at epidemiologyandinfection@cambridge.org. Please include the following details:

• Which step(s) in an epidemiologic outbreak investigation your study is addressing;
• Lead author;
• Short summary;
• Estimated month of submission.

The final date for submission of papers will be notified in due course to all those who have registered interest.