71 years, 70% of patients from other provinces, and the founding host of the National Medical Center for Infectious Diseases
To walk into the Department of Infectious Diseases of Huashan Hospital in western Shanghai is to step into what is, by referral volume, the most difficult infectious-disease service in China. The department was founded in 1955 by Professor Dai Ziying, the founding father of Chinese clinical microbiology, and over the following seven decades it became the country’s national referral centre for the most difficult infections. More than 70 percent of the department’s inpatients are referred from other provinces, a level of case concentration that no other Chinese infectious-diseases unit can match. In the 2024 Fudan Hospital Specialty Reputation Rankings, the Huashan Department of Infectious Diseases was named China’s leading infectious-diseases unit, a position it has held for years.
The department’s role in the country is not just clinical. In April 2021 it was designated by the National Health Commission as the founding host of the National Medical Center for Infectious Diseases (together with Beijing Ditan Hospital and, from June 2021, Zhejiang University’s First Affiliated Hospital). It was one of the country’s first doctoral programmes in infectious diseases (1978) and one of the first national key disciplines in the field (1989, re-confirmed 2001). It is the institutional home of the China Antimicrobial Surveillance Network (CHINET), the country’s largest bacterial-resistance monitoring platform, and the Shanghai Municipal Key Laboratory of Infectious Diseases and Biosafety. In 2010 the department moved into a dedicated 9,010-square-metre infectious-disease building on the Huashan campus.
What the place actually looks like
Where most infectious-diseases units in the world are organised around a single pathogen (HIV, TB, hepatitis), the Huashan department is organised around the full chain of difficult infections. Its five flagship research areas are: the immunological pathogenesis of viral hepatitis; resistance diagnosis, surveillance, and individualised therapy; the diagnosis of fever of unknown origin and emerging or re-emerging infectious diseases; the molecular mechanisms and rapid diagnosis of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis; and the new diagnosis and treatment of deep fungal infections. Its clinical specialty areas are: viral hepatitis and related liver disease (with individualised and optimised treatment); central nervous system infection; fever of unknown origin and emerging infections; and deep fungal infection.
That structural choice — a single department that handles every kind of difficult infection in every kind of patient, with the founding host of the National Medical Center for Infectious Diseases attached — is the operational reason the Huashan department has been able to lead the Chinese field for seven decades. A patient who walks in with what looks like an undifferentiated fever can be evaluated, worked up for the country’s most common and most unusual causes (including tropical infections, opportunistic infections in immunocompromised patients, and travel-related infections), and managed by a team that has seen more of the same case than any other Chinese team has.
Why it became No.1
Three factors explain the Huashan department’s grip on the Fudan ranking. First, the historical first-mover position: the department was founded in 1955, before any other Chinese university had a dedicated clinical microbiology unit, and was given country-leading roles in clinical bacteriology, antimicrobial resistance, and difficult infection management by the founding generation of Chinese infectious-diseases physicians, including Professor Dai Ziying, Professor Xu Zhaoyue, Professor Liu Yukun, Professor Wang Fu, Professor Zhang Yinyuan, and Professor Weng Xinhua. Second, an unmatched research and surveillance output: the department runs CHINET, the country’s largest bacterial-resistance monitoring network; it has led or co-led the National Science and Technology key research programmes on major infectious diseases from the Sixth Five-Year Plan to the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan; it has been selected as a Ministry of Education key discipline four times (1989, 1996, 2001, and the most recent re-evaluation); and its faculty has won more than 20 national and ministerial science and technology awards. Third, and most distinctive internationally, the department was designated in 2021 as the founding host of the National Medical Center for Infectious Diseases — the first of the three Chinese institutions that now hold the designation — giving it the same kind of national-coordinating role in infectious diseases that the National Cancer Center plays in oncology.
That history matters for international patients because the Huashan department is the only place in China where a difficult infection can be worked up against a clinical microbiology laboratory that has been running continuously for seven decades and a bacterial-resistance surveillance network that covers hundreds of Chinese tertiary hospitals.
What this means for international patients
For a foreign patient considering evaluation of a difficult infection in China, the Huashan Department of Infectious Diseases is the place that handles the cases the rest of the country refers out. The department runs an international patient office and a multilingual case-coordination service. It is the host of the National Medical Center for Infectious Diseases, which means its clinical protocols are the de facto standard for difficult infection management in China and a reference for the wider Asia-Pacific region. The hospital’s wider campus includes the National Clinical Research Center for Aging and Medicine and the Shanghai Medical College of Fudan University, which means international patients benefit from the depth of the wider university hospital system in handling the multi-organ complications that often accompany severe infections.
The department’s specialty areas are anchored to internationally recognised strengths: antimicrobial resistance (where its CHINET surveillance network is one of the largest in Asia); viral hepatitis (where its individualised treatment protocols are widely used in mainland China); central nervous system infection (where its case volume is the largest in the country); and fever of unknown origin (where the department is the country’s primary referral destination). The department is at 12 Wulumuqi Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai. This profile is editorial information based on the sources linked below, not treatment advice; individual outcomes depend on the pathogen, the patient’s immune status, the timing of presentation, and the team.