Science Daily April 6, 2020 A common theme among previously proposed models for network epidemics is the assumption that the propagating object (e.g., a pathogen or a piece of information) is transferred across network nodes without going through any modification or evolutionary adaptations. In real-life spreading processes, pathogens often evolve in response to changing environments and medical interventions, and information is often modified by individuals before being forwarded. A team of researchers in the US (Carnegie Mellon University, Princeton University) investigate the effects of evolutionary adaptations on spreading processes in complex networks with the aim of revealing the role of […]
Tag Archives: Epidemics
Forecasting COVID-19’s Trajectory
American Physical Society March 23, 2020 As COVID-19 spreads like wildfire across the globe, politicians must weigh difficult options to mitigate its impact. These decisions are guided by infectious-disease modelers, and physicists are an influential part of the mix. Harnessing today’s computing power, they solve models that capture the probabilistic nature of viral transmission and the dynamics of social behavior, delivering quantitative predictions with ever-increasing accuracy. Network theorists can integrate massive amounts of real data into their models, using publicly available databases on air travel and ground mobility. While it’s impossible to divert an extreme weather event epidemiological tools can […]
Outbreak science: Infectious disease research leads to outbreak predictions
Science Daily January 8, 2020 An international team of researchers (Finland, USA – Georgetown University, Canada) used information from the Global Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology Network (GIDEON) data resource to develop a simple approach to accurately predict disease outbreaks by combining novel statistical techniques and a large dataset on pathogen biogeography (spatial distribution of pathogens across the globe). The approach takes pairwise dissimilarities between countries’ pathogen communities and pathogens’ geographical distributions and uses these to predict country–pathogen associations. They compare the success rates of their model for predicting pathogen outbreak, emergence and re-emergence potential as a function of time…read more. […]
How Does USAMRIID Shut Down Impact Nation’s Bioterrorism Laboratory Response Network?
Global Biodefense August 13, 2019 The U.S. Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) Special Pathogens Laboratory at Fort Detrick is one of only three National Laboratories at the top of the protective umbrella of the Laboratory Response Network (LRN) structure, along with those operated by the CDC and the Naval Medical Research Center (NMRC), responsible for specialized characterization of organisms, bioforensics, select agent activity, and handling highly infectious biological agents. What happens when an important component of the nation’s biopreparedness infrastructure fails to meet CDC biosafety requirements and has its Federal Select Agent certification pulled? Global Biodefense submitted requests […]
This Chilling Simulation Shows What a Measles Outbreak Could Do to Your City
Science Alert May 15, 2019 A team of researchers in the US (University of Pittsburgh, University of South Florida) used a customized simulation tool called FRED (A Framework for Reconstructing Epidemiological Dynamics) to realistically represent the infection risks faced by individual schools in each Floridian county with actual school vaccination data. The tool reveals what could happen if a single student with measles attended schools in the locality – alongside a separate simulation showing what an epidemic might look like if the vaccination rate in schools in the same place were decreased by 10 percent…read more. The US-wide FRED Measles […]
A billion people will be newly exposed to diseases like dengue fever as world temperatures rise
Science Daily March 28, 2019 An international team of researchers (USA – University of Florida, South Africa) applied an empirically parameterized model of viral transmission by the vectors Aedes aegypti and Ae. albopictus, as a function of temperature, to predict cumulative monthly global transmission risk in current climates and compare them with projected risk in 2050 and 2080 based on general circulation models. According to the researchers climate-driven risk of transmission from both mosquitoes will increase substantially, even in the short term, for most of Europe. In contrast, significant reductions in climate suitability are expected for Ae. albopictus, most noticeably […]