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Conference at ASU projects swine flu's future
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A vaccine for swine flu remains months away, but experts gathering at Arizona State University hope to fend off the disease with their smarts.
With the recent declaration of a worldwide pandemic and the virus' return expected in the fall, authorities in the fields of public health, mathematics and bio-statistics are working on how to best react to a second outbreak.
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During the four-day conference, which ends Sunday, scientists and scholars from across the Western Hemisphere will use computer modeling and complex equations to predict who might contract swine flu as well as how and where it will spread.
Carlos Castillo-Chavez, an ASU professor who helped organize the event, said using these simulations and analysis from this spring's outbreak can help experts determine the best preventative actions.
"Changes in behavior, travel patterns, closing the schools - we study all these in a virtual world in a great number of scenarios, and then we report our findings and let the people that really make decisions find out how useful this information is," said Castillo-Chavez, director of ASU's new Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Also attending the conference is a local decision-maker: Dr. Bob England, Maricopa County's public health director. England said the conference is useful because the experts can learn ahead of time how changes in variables will affect this pandemic.
For example, a presentation made Friday by a Yale University researcher detailed how the public might react to the availability of a vaccine. Some people would rush out for inoculations, yet others would decline it out of fear of side effects or concern over the vaccine's effectiveness.
"There are so many unknowns that no one can accurately predict," England said. "We just have to respond to changing understanding and changing circumstances as we go along."
The World Heath Organization said earlier this month that swine flu's spread had reached pandemic proportions, making it the first global flu epidemic in 41 years.
Through Friday, WHO has confirmed 59,814 cases, including 263 deaths. Arizona is home to 729 confirmed cases, nine of which proved fatal.
Swine flu produces symptoms similar to other strains of influenza: a moderate fever, sore throat, body aches and exhaustion.
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