Defense News April 9, 2021 According to a new report from the Council on Strategic Risks, the U.S. Defense Department should dramatically increase funding for biological defense initiatives to at least $2 billion in the next year followed by increasing it to a range of $6.5 billion to $7 billion annually in the coming years. It will deter other nations from seeking to exploit America’s perceived vulnerability to a medical crisis. Key investment areas should include nucleic-acid based therapeutics, field-and-clinic deployable early-detection technology that can identify any pathogen by reading its genetic material and expanding international cooperation on biodefense issues […]
Tag Archives: Pandemics
Back to the Lab? We Want to Hear From You
American Physical Society July 27, 2020 As scientists around the world are slowly returning to their offices and labs APS News and Physics want to hear about their experiences. What plans have they made to keep themselves or their group safe? How is distancing affecting their interactions? How have months away from the lab affected their perspective? Tell them your story in a brief (100–200 words) letter to physics@aps.org. Pictures are welcome too. Each week, APS News and Physics will select a few of these letters and photos to share online…read more.
Researchers develop a method for predicting unprecedented events
Science Daily July 23, 2020 Challenging the quintessentially unpredictable nature of black swan events researchers at Stanford University developed a forecasting method based on natural systems. They leveraged increasingly available long-term high-frequency ecological tracking data, to analyze multiple natural and experimental ecosystems (marine plankton, deciduous forest), and recovered hidden linearity embedded in universal ‘scaling laws’ of species dynamics. They developed a method using these scaling laws to reduce data dependence in ecological forecasting and accurately predict extreme events beyond the span of historical observations in diverse ecosystems. They would like to expand the application of their method to other systems […]
Modeling infectious disease dynamics
Science Magazine May 15, 2020 According to researchers at the University of Chicago, mathematical modeling and historical influenza pandemics provide a warning about comparing the effects of interventions in different populations. A rapid decline in COVID-19 cases or a small springtime epidemic might be taken as evidence that interventions have been especially effective or that herd immunity has been achieved. But simple models show that epidemic dynamics become deeply unintuitive when there is seasonal variation in susceptibility or transmission, and especially when there is movement between populations. For SARS-CoV-2, like influenza virus, the shape of seasonal variation is uncertain. Linear […]
COVIDScholar: AI Tool Sifts Through Thousands of Papers to Guide Researchers
Global Biodefense May 12, 2020 Every day, hundreds of scientific papers about COVID-19 come out, in both traditional journals and non-peer-reviewed preprints. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab are using the latest artificial intelligence techniques to build COVIDScholar, a search engine dedicated to COVID-19. It includes tools that pick up subtle clues like similar drugs or research methodologies to recommend relevant research to scientists. AI can capture latent scientific knowledge from text, making connections that humans missed. They built web scrapers that collect new papers as they are published from a wide variety of sources, making them available on the […]
Predicting Contagion Speed
American Physical Society February 12, 2020 To effectively monitor, design, or intervene in epidemic-like processes, there is a need to predict the speed of a particular contagion in a particular network, and to distinguish between nodes that are more likely to become infected sooner or later during an outbreak. Researchers in the UK studied global transport and communication networks using a message-passing approach to derive simple and effective predictions that are validated against epidemic simulations on a variety of real-world networks with good agreement. In addition to individualized predictions for different nodes, they found an overall sudden transition from low […]
Researchers develop universal flu vaccine that protects against 6 influenza viruses in mice
EurekAlert January 7, 2020 Researchers at Georgia State University have developed a nanoparticle vaccine which combines two major influenza proteins that is effective in providing broad, long-lasting protection against influenza virus in mice, showing promise as a universal flu vaccine. The double-layered nanoparticle vaccine contains the influenza virus proteins matrix protein 2 ectodomain and neuraminidase. Mice were immunized with the nanoparticle vaccine before being exposed to influenza virus, and they were protected against six different strains of the virus…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Spanish flu may have lingered two years before 1918 outbreak and vaccine could have treated it
Science Daily May 23, 2019 A team of researchers in the UK revisited the literature published in Europe and the United States, and the notes left by physicians who lived at the time. According to them the science of 2018 provides us with tools which did not exist at the time. Two such tools are ‘gain of function’ where a potential pandemic virus, such as influenza A (H5N1), can be deliberately mutated in the laboratory in order to change its virulence and spreadability. Key mutations can then be identified. A second tool lies in phylogenetics, combined with molecular clock analysis. […]
Protecting the Nation from Emerging and Pandemic Infectious Diseases and CBRN Threats
ASPR Blog February 13, 2019 To help protect the nation from emerging and pandemic infectious diseases and CBRN threats, HHS published the 2019-2022 National Health Security Strategy (NHSS) , its quadrennial strategy to prepare and safeguard the nation’s health in times of crisis. A premise behind the report is that all levels of government and private sector partners have important roles to play to improve the nation’s ability to respond to and recover from 21st century threats. To protect the nation more effectively from these emerging threats, HHS will use this whole of government/nation approach to, Deepen interoperability, Support and sustain […]
Defenses Against the Biggest Risk We Face
Next Big Future December 9, 2018 One [Open Access] study found the worldwide spread of a serious infectious disease could result in pandemic-related deaths of 700,000 and annual economic losses of $500 billion. The World Health Organization had a scientific report that modeled the impact of a 1918 style flu pandemic in 2018. They estimated that there would still be 20 to 33 million deaths. This took into account modern vaccination, drugs and public health procedures…read more.