Alum’s Startup Tracks Infectious Disease Risk at the World Cup

In the summer of 2025, Mirelle Pereira, MPH’26, was in Sierra Leone for her APEx, a summer internship undertaken as part of the Columbia Mailman School MPH degree. Embedded with a team of infectious disease specialists from ICAP at Columbia, she worked to combat an Mpox outbreak. There, she saw firsthand that early signal detection and data quality can make a crucial difference by helping public health authorities to quickly respond to an outbreak.

By then, she had already launched Santé, a health-tech startup whose core offering is an early warning system built on epidemic modeling. In Sierra Leone, she realized that the World Cup, whose in-person audience includes people from all over the world, could be the site of one or more infectious outbreaks, and that Santé could provide the data infrastructure for early detection. That idea came to fruition this summer, as Santé, in partnership with the tournament’s sponsors and organizers, generates daily technical reports on infectious disease risks in 16 host cities across North America.

The Santé AI-powered algorithm draws on multiple data sources, including climate data, wastewater testing, and human mobility data. Daily risks are available via WhatsApp in any language (so far, the technology has not identified any major threats). Pereira and her co-founders are already in talks about doing the same for the upcoming U.S. Open in New York and the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. “We want Santé to be the global leader in epidemic risk intelligence for mass gathering events,” she says.

In conversation with Transmission, Pereira shared more about her public health journey and how her time at Columbia was instrumental in launching her startup.

What experiences first got you interested in public health?

Pereira: I was born and raised in Brazil. My grandparents, on my mother’s side, lived in a small town without sanitation. Like many areas of Brazil, it was a hotbed of outbreaks such as chikungunya and dengue during the rainy season. That experience led me to study sanitation engineering. In college, I got a Fulbright to study public health and environmental engineering at the University of Miami for a year. During that time, I traveled to Haiti to support the cholera outbreak response and collect field data. It was horrific. I saw children dying in the clinic where I was working. I realized then that this would be my career, and that I could help people who lived like my grandparents did, and who were still dying of preventable diseases. The name “Santé” is a reference to what Haitian people say when they make a toast; “à la santé” reflects their belief that health is life’s greatest asset. “Santé” in Haitian Creole means “health.”

What brought you to Columbia Mailman?  

Pereira: After college, I was at J&J for five years. I worked with their global innovation team in California and the regional team in Brazil. I decided to get an MPH because I wanted to build on my sanitation engineering background by adding a stronger foundation in outbreak response and infectious disease epidemiology, so I could help translate epidemiological data into risk visibility for both public- and private-sector decision-makers. At Mailman, I was in PopFam [the Department of Population and Family Health] with a certificate in infectious diseases and epidemiology. Highlights included a class in epi modeling for infectious diseases with Professor Wan Yang, a class in outbreak preparedness and response in resource-limited settings with Professor Rachel Moresky, and a class in investigative methods in complex emergencies with Professor Claire Greene.

I put all those skills into practice during a live outbreak response during my APEx in Sierra Leone, where I worked on the ground with the ICAP team, led by Susan Michaels-Strasser, to support the Ministry of Health and the National Public Health Agency. Not only did I get training in infectious diseases and epidemiology, but Columbia also helped me launch my startup. I was involved with the Healthcare Ventures group at Mailman, and that experience led me to win the Greater Good Challenge from SPS [Columbia’s School of Professional Studies] and the SIPA [School of International and Public Affairs] Global Policy Challenge, which led us to apply for the Columbia Startup Lab, which provided some of the first funding for Santé. Right now, Santé’s office is at the Lab.

What’s next for Santé?

Pereira: We are evolving. Our initial go-to-market strategy centered on government partnerships across Latin America, including Brazil’s Ministry of Health, but government procurement cycles slowed public-sector adoption more than anticipated. We pivoted to the private sector, which let us scale up faster. We started engaging reinsurance companies that lacked access to real-time, epidemiologically grounded risk data to inform their pricing, reserves, and underwriting workflows, as well as organizers of large mass-gathering events seeking to strengthen their public health preparedness. Over the last few months, we joined the Breakthrough Ventures accelerator in the Bay Area, which funded the World Cup project, and we’re heading into a biosecurity accelerator in San Francisco.

Just look at what’s happening right now with Ebola. The current Bundibugyo outbreak in the DRC and Uganda is already a public health emergency of international concern, driven in part by high population mobility across a densely connected region. When we think about mass gathering events, that same mobility dynamic is amplified. Large, transient populations create ideal conditions for the importation of diseases across borders, making outbreak containment exponentially more difficult. The world can’t afford to wait for outbreaks to become emergencies before acting. That’s what we’re building at Santé—the infrastructure that gives decision-makers the early signal they need before transmission escalates a contained outbreak into a multi-country outbreak.

We are turning epidemic risk into actionable insights to protect both capital and humankind. But we’re also excited to have the opportunity to communicate about health risks to a broader audience. Fans traveling to events want to be better prepared, and everyone is seeking reliable health information so they know which prevention measures matter most for the diseases that could affect their community. We’re truly looking forward to what’s ahead.