Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The United States plans to spend more than $28 million in hopes that computer bytes and scientists’ brains hold strategies for controlling an influenza epidemic or bioterror attack, the National Institutes of Health announced yesterday (see GSN, Feb. 13).

The NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences intends to distribute the funds over five years to four teams of scientists to prepare computer models on the spread of infectious diseases.

The plan calls for researchers in the Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study [MIDAS] to devise models of communities of varying size, then simulate the effects of different outbreaks and the potential for success of response options, said Eric Jakobsson, NIGMS bioinformatics and computational biology director.

The models would eventually help guide policy-makers to prepare for emergencies, and offer “on-the-fly guidance on what are the best options for emergency response,” Jakobsson said today in an interview with Global Security Newswire.

“One thing that’s really important for people to understand is that these models … will never provide 100 percent accuracy of whatever is going to happen in any potential case,” he said. However, “as the models get better and better and better, they can give policy-makers a much more realistic version of scenarios than would exist without the models,” Jakobsson said.

Professionals from such disciplines as mathematics, computer science, epidemiology, genetics and public health are set work on the project. Three teams are scheduled to receive $9.5 million to prepare computer models, while the fourth group has $18.8 million to develop a database organizing the other scientists’ work and to prepare “user-friendly computer modeling tools” for government officials and others to simulate outbreaks and response plans, according to an NIH release.

Grant recipients include:

*         A group of researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Brookings Institution, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the University of Maryland and London’s Imperial College. The team plans to create “highly visual, user-friendly computational analyses of disease outbreaks,” based on factors such as incubation period, transmission rate, weather and social networks, the press release states. Researchers also intend to evaluate the effectiveness within the models of outbreak control methods such as vaccination and quarantine on smallpox, dengue fever, West Nile virus and other infectious diseases;

*         A team at Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico that plans to examine how different social networks and populations affect the spread or containment of an outbreak in a theoretical urban area of 1.5 million people;

*         An Emory University group that intends to model outbreaks in hypothetical U.S. towns and cities with populations ranging from 2,000 to 48,000. Scientists at the Georgia school plan to examine the effectiveness of various control methods on smallpox, SARS, pandemic influenza and other possible biological agents or diseases, the press release states; and

*         An effort led by Research Triangle Institute International to compile the collected information and develop tools for the scientific community, policy-makers and medical personnel to use the computer models.

Even while the models are being developed, researchers would be able to work on specific scenarios presented by agencies such as the Homeland Security Department, Jakobsson said. Epidemiologists not affiliated with the project would likely have access to the models, which could also be used for training public health students, he said.

It is not yet known if the MIDAS program will receive funding for further modeling projects, Jakobsson said.

His hope is that this program will be the “catalyst” for efforts to create integrated access to all information for responding to natural or terrorist-related outbreaks. That information now is maintained in multiple areas with different formats and levels of access, Jakobsson said.

“This is a start. This is a prototype project,” he said.