Modeling Diseases Many Pathways

Is it possible to model and predict how diseases are spread? I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Eubank: For the last 10-15 years, I’ve been modeling the way disease spreads in a society. That takes into account how people move around, how they come into contact with things that might transmit disease like mosquito’s or ticks – any kind of contact somebody has with a pathogen, something that causes disease.

Stephen Eubank is a professor at the Virginia/Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine.

Eubank: There’s lots of different ways that things are transmitted from person-to-person or through the environment or through insects and things in the environment. We’re trying to figure out how all these pathways interact with each other and how we can prevent the spread of disease, as easily as possible without bringing society to a crashing halt by making everybody sit in a room by themselves forever.

What we’re trying to do is figure out what’s the simplest intervention you can do that breaks the chain of transmission from one thing to another and yet allows people to carry on their daily lives, and to communicate with each other.
For a long time people tried to model these kinds of disease systems by assuming that everything was all mixed together and that if somebody got sick in one place, that everybody in a whole region would be exposed to them. We take a different approach. We try to understand how people come into contact with the things that make them sick. How those contacts depend on the things they do in their daily lives, how they move around. For example, if there’s an influenza epidemic, we try to understand how it gets into a community, how it spreads through the community. Does it go through the school children? Does it go through adults at work? What is it that’s responsible for maintaining the spread of disease and how can we shut that down?

We’ll hear more on modeling the spread of disease in future programs. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Modeling Diseases Many Pathways

What's responsible for maintaining the spread of disease?

Air Date:05/08/2017

Scientist:

Transcript:

Modeling Diseases Many Pathways

Is it possible to model and predict how diseases are spread? I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Eubank: For the last 10-15 years, I've been modeling the way disease spreads in a society. That takes into account how people move around, how they come into contact with things that might transmit disease like mosquito's or ticks - any kind of contact somebody has with a pathogen, something that causes disease.

Stephen Eubank is a professor at the Virginia/Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine.

Eubank: There's lots of different ways that things are transmitted from person-to-person or through the environment or through insects and things in the environment. We're trying to figure out how all these pathways interact with each other and how we can prevent the spread of disease, as easily as possible without bringing society to a crashing halt by making everybody sit in a room by themselves forever.

What we're trying to do is figure out what's the simplest intervention you can do that breaks the chain of transmission from one thing to another and yet allows people to carry on their daily lives, and to communicate with each other.
For a long time people tried to model these kinds of disease systems by assuming that everything was all mixed together and that if somebody got sick in one place, that everybody in a whole region would be exposed to them. We take a different approach. We try to understand how people come into contact with the things that make them sick. How those contacts depend on the things they do in their daily lives, how they move around. For example, if there's an influenza epidemic, we try to understand how it gets into a community, how it spreads through the community. Does it go through the school children? Does it go through adults at work? What is it that's responsible for maintaining the spread of disease and how can we shut that down?

We'll hear more on modeling the spread of disease in future programs. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.