Modeling Disease The Lens of Culture
To find out how diseases are spread in other societies, it’s important to have an understanding of their cultural practices. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Stephen Eubank is a professor at the Virginia/Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine. His creates computer models to track diseases worldwide. But creating a model is just one part of the process.
Eubank: So somebody has to sit down and say, “This looks like a really important pathway for the spread of disease.” Without that, I don’t think there’s anyway that a mathematical modeler could tell you, “Oh, let’s look here. Let’s look there.” It’s really a group effort to understand the process.
To take one example, in the recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa, one of the really important activities to understand was burial practices for victims of the Ebola disease.
In West Africa, funeral practices generally involve washing and cleaning the body, a lot of close contact with corpses. This kind of close contact is the ideal transmission path for the virus that causes Ebola.
It was trying to understand how much effort needed to go into changing this deep-seated cultural and human practice of burying our dead and grieving for them. How much did we need to do that in order to prevent the outbreak from spreading farther? Those kinds of questions are really hard to tackle unless you understand something about how much transmission is going on due to the funeral practices, versus how much is going on, say, in a hospital.
My personal opinion is that the funeral practices were the driving factor in that outbreak, and it was the hard work of people on the ground to convince others that at least for the duration of this outbreak, we had to be very careful in the way we handled corpses that made the difference in the Ebola outbreak.
We’ll hear more about tracking the spread of disease in future programs. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.