ACADEMIA

The UK's Medical Research Council (MRC) is setting up a new research center to track the spread of infectious diseases around the world. SARS and H5N1 avian influenza have recently highlighted the need to improve our readiness for new epidemics. Understanding how best to control epidemics using public health measures, travel restrictions, drugs and vaccines is therefore critically important. The MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling will make this the core of its mission. Center researchers will employ mathematical modelling and statistical analysis, working closely with public health organizations around the world. The center in London will use a network of supercomputers to create a model of the entire global population in order to predict how diseases will spread from country to country. It is hoped that the system will be able to respond within one hour of the first reports of an outbreak, and allow quick action to be taken to prevent a global pandemic of diseases such as flu or Sars, potentially saving tens of millions of lives. It will also be able to evaluate the effectiveness of measures being taken to stop the spread of the illness. The center at Imperial College is headed by Professor Neil Ferguson, who helped the Government map the spread of BSE and foot-and-mouth disease and is one of the world's leading experts on the spread of flu. One of the key factors built into his model is the way in which the large-scale transport of humans and animals now allows new diseases to spread rapidly to all corners of the globe. MRC chief executive Sir Colin Blakemore told BBC Radio 4's Today program: "Neil Ferguson is the leading mathematical modeller and has already contributed very much to the world planning, particularly facing the possibility of a pandemic of flu. "What he is planning to do is construct a network of supercomputers literally to model the entire population of the world. Say there is an outbreak, a cluster of infection, in Indonesia of a new type with clear evidence of spread from person to person - within one hour this model will be able to tell us how that would then spread around the world." The 2003 outbreak of the respiratory disease Sars in south Asia provided an example of how interventionist public health policy can now nip a virus in the bud which could otherwise have gone on to kill large numbers of people, said Prof Blakemore. "Let us not forget that we face the possibility of a pandemic of flu now," he said. "In 1918, it was not even known that flu was caused by a virus, there was no understanding of the method of transmission and the world simply looked on as probably 40 million people died. Now, at least, we have the mechanisms for surveilling the disease, understanding the pattern of spread, knowing what the pathogen is that produces it, producing vaccines and anti-viral agents to treat it. At least we have a chance of doing a lot better than in the past." "This MRC center has the potential to make a real difference in the world’s capacity to plan for and respond to new epidemics and pandemics. It will develop methods to help public health agencies use limited data to project the impact of an emerging epidemic and optimise control efforts," said Professor Neil Ferguson.