FIFA World Cup 2026 — Pathogen Risk Screening

We evaluated — pathogens using a standardized threat assessment protocol. This protocol considers whether a pathogen is currently present in the United States, it potential to become endemic and, if not, the number of expected importations, a pathogens's potential for onward transmission, and the impact of each infection (see About & Methodology). Where evidence is limited, we chose pessimistic assumptions to avoid understating potential public health concern. For this reason, we give you the ability to modify the values we use in the screening, or add new pathogens, to see how those changes affect the results.

Click any row to inspect the decision in full and override any flag or parameter to see how the bucket changes. Edits persist locally in your browser.

For more info and a walk-through of the process, see this narrative, and full technical details are available in our preprint.

Priority

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Excluded

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Total tracked

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Priority pathogens

Sorted alphabetically. Click any row for full detail.

About this dashboard

Pathogen Risk Screening — Methodology

This dashboard provides an interactive interface to browse and modify the assumptions behind Insight Net's screening of the infectious-disease threat posed to the United States by the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Working with the US CDC, teams across Insight Net assessed 77 pathogens across three dimensions — excess importation risk, outbreak potential, and per-case impact — to identify a short list of "priority" pathogens that may warrant heightened monitoring during the tournament.

Screening flow

Simplified schematic of the screening protocol; see Figure 2 of the accompanying paper for the full version.

Excess importations. Baseline travel is estimated with the GLEAM-EpiRisk metapopulation model on OAG flight data (~3,200 catchment areas worldwide), reflecting typical June 2026 patterns. A World Cup travel surge is layered on — a +20% increase from participating countries is the primary scenario (+10% and +35% also modeled), routed to the host cities where each team plays group-stage matches. Combined with source-country surveillance (or, where unavailable, rate-based or analogous-pathogen estimates), this yields expected monthly imported infections per pathogen. See the importation-risk dashboard for a detailed exploration of importation risk.

Outbreak potential. A branching-process model simulates spread from a single introduction over a mass-gathering window of up to 17 days (the longest group-play span in one host city, plus two days). Offspring are negative-binomial in R₀ and overdispersion k, propagated across generations set by the generation time g, assuming no susceptible depletion. World Cup transmission is amplified 1.2× over baseline (from 2022 Qatar World Cup COVID-19 data). Mean per-introduction outbreak size comes from 1 million simulations, computed for both World Cup and baseline R₀.

Excess infections and risk. Excess infections combine imported infections × World Cup outbreak size with locally present infections × (World Cup − baseline outbreak size). Multiplying by per-case impact — medical, public-health-response, and productivity costs in US dollars (productivity via DALYs × US GDP per capita where not directly reported) — gives the excess World Cup risk, compared against the $25,000 inclusion threshold.

Each pathogen lands in one of two buckets:

Priority — meets the inclusion criteria and warrants close monitoring during the tournament.
Excluded — fails an explicit exclusion criterion (no acute sequelae, risk below threshold, zero expected imports, imports not significant vs local prevalence, etc.).

The global inclusion threshold (default $25,000, the value used in the paper) is the per-pathogen excess-risk cutoff for inclusion; it's retunable from the masthead. Each pathogen page lets you override the screening answers and parameter values, and re-run the simulation to see how the per-case outbreak size and risk value respond. Edits live locally in your browser; they don't affect anyone else's view, and they don't write back to the source sheet.

The Add Your Own tab lets you enter a pathogen that isn't in the curated list and run it through the same screening + simulation + risk-derivation tooling. User-added pathogens appear in the overview alongside the curated ones, tagged accordingly, and can be removed from their detail page.