World Health Organization
Alessandro Cassini is a medical doctor specialised in public health and epidemiology. After an MSc in Health Policy Planning and Financing from LSE & LSHTM, he worked as a consultant epidemiologist in London. In 2009 Ale joined the European centre for Disease Prevention and Control. At ECDC he led the Burden of Communicable Diseases in Europe (BCoDE) project with the remit of estimating and expressing the health burden of communicable diseases and related conditions, including exploring ways to bridge the communication and technical gap between risk assessors and managers (knowledge translation) and ultimately enhance informed and evidence-based health policy decision-making. This methodology was subsequently applied to the estimation of the burden of healthcare-associated infections, which were shown to be a top infectious disease priority, and more recently to infections with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The latter resulted in a study involving a multi-disciplinary approach and modelling of several data sources. At ECDC, Alessandro has also been responsible for ECDC country visits to discuss AMR issues, for field work in outbreak response (e.g. Ebola), for EUCAST and supported the development of risk ranking methodologies. In March 2019, Alessandro joined the World Health Organization as Technical Officer in the Infection Prevention and Control Global Unit (Service Delivery and Safety).