SARS: A Model Disease

30 November, 2011 (20:00) | Home Insurance | By: admin

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A new model to predict the spread of emerging diseases has been developed by researchers within the US, Italy, and France. The model, described within the on the internet open access journal BMC Medicine, could give healthcare specialists advance warning of the path an emerging disease might take and so might improve emergency responses and control.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) spread rapidly in 2002-2003, revealing just how vulnerable we might be to emerging diseases and how global transportation is essential towards the spread of an epidemic.

Now, Vittoria Colizza and Alessandro Vespignani of Indiana University, Bloomington, USA as well as the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation, in Turin, Italy, and colleagues in France have developed a predictive model of the spread of emerging diseases based on actual travel and census information for much more than 3 thousand urban areas in 220 countries. The model provides predictions of how most likely an outbreak will be in each region and how widespread it might turn out to be. The analysis highlights just how the accuracy in predicting the spreading pattern of an epidemic can be related to clearly identifiable routes by which the disease could spread.

In order to assess the predictive power of their model, the researchers turned towards the historical records of the global spread of the SARS virus. They evaluated the initial conditions before the illness had spread widely, based on the data for the arrival of the very first patient who left mainland China for Hong Kong, and for the resulting outbreak there. They then simulated the likelihood that SARS would emerge in specific countries thereafter, as brought by infectious travelers. The simulated outcomes fit very accurately with the actual pattern of the spread of SARS in 2002. Analysis of the outcomes also identified possible paths of the virus’ spread along the routes of commercial air travel, highlighting some preferred channels which might serve as epidemic pathways for the global spread of the illness.

“The presented computational strategy shows that the integration of long-range mobility and demographic information supplies epidemic models with a predictive power that can be consistently tested,” the researchers explain. “This computational strategy can be as a result considered as a general tool within the analysis and forecast of the global spreading of emerging diseases.”

Article
Predictability and epidemic pathways in global outbreaks of infectious diseases: the SARS case study Vittoria Colizza, Alain Barrat, Marc Barthelemy and Alessandro Vespignani
BMC Medicine

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