MIDAS Information technology meets biodefense

by David Orenstein free-lance writer

Although natural epidemics such as SARS and the West Nile virus have received a lot of attention lately, they seem like back-page news compared to another fear: an epidemic intentionally spread by terrorists. There is a strong urgency to enlist information technology’s help in epidemiology and public health. Where there is urgency, of course, there is grant money. The National Institutes of Health this spring announced four grants totaling $28 million over five years to fund the development of computer systems that will help physicians analyze and respond to disease outbreaks.

The effort makes sense. Information technology probably can do more for epidemiology and public health than any other medical discipline (except, perhaps, genetics or drug design). Consider what computers do best: They make large amounts of complex data manageable and analyzable; they can perform mammoth calculations with relative ease; and, when networked, they make it easy to share and distribute information instantly and widely.

NIH’s goal with this new grant program, dubbed MIDAS (Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study), is to find ways to take advantage of all three of those capabilities. Three of the four grants will fund research to create mathematical models covering various aspects of epidemics and community responses to them. The fourth grant will establish a database of disease and response information as well as the software tools to make that data useful for policy makers and health officials.

All this seems like a tall order, but the true enormity becomes clearer upon looking at the grant projects themselves. They touch on a wide range of disciplines, from obvious ones (computer science, mathematics, and medicine) to far less obvious ones (meteorology and sociology).

In one project, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico will attempt to model hypothetical urban areas (population 1.5 million) to see how social contacts and networks can affect the spread and possible containment of multiple interacting disease-causing organisms. They’ll also try to model how social contacts might change when disease strikes and the community responds.

A project at Emory University in Atlanta will look at much smaller communities (population 2000 to 48,000) and will focus on the best ways to respond to a variety of diseases. Using the computer models they create, researchers will study the effects of practices such as surveillance, containment, vaccination, medical treatment, and the closing of key institutions. They also will study how diseases can afflict individuals and spread among them. Emory’s plans include simulations of smallpox, SARS, and pandemic influenza.

A similar menu of ailments will set the stage for scientists at institutions including Johns Hopkins, the Brookings Institution, NASA, and the University of Maryland, who will attempt to create user-friendly, graphical analyses of outbreaks. The group plans incredibly broad-based models based on historic and modern data that incorporate disease incubation periods, transmission rates, weather patterns, a person’s individual susceptibility, and social networks. Researchers then will evaluate how effective containment methods such as vaccination, contact tracing, and quarantine might be.

In announcing the grants, NIH director Elias A. Zerhouni, MD, said, “MIDAS will play a key role in the NIH biodefense plan. The computer models created through this initiative will help us determine the best strategies to detect, control, and prevent the spread of disease.”

If we haven’t determined good strategies yet, we’d certainly better do it soon. Let’s hope this helps.

David Orenstein is a technology and business writer in Silicon Valley. To learn more about a technology topic in Computing Care, e-mail him at davealli@comcast.net.