When it comes to a disease as frightening as Ebola, it may be comforting to know teams of scientists are working to understand possible future scenarios: How the virus might spread, and how that could be best stopped.
Scientists from a dozen universities have been tasked by the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health to model possible future scenarios for the path of the Ebola Virus outbreak in West Africa. The group is known as MIDAS for Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study.
"As horrible as it is, it's what I've tried to train myself for, is for sort of an event like this, and in a lot of ways our group has done a lot of work to position ourselves so that so that we'd have a lot of these tools on the shelf so that if a crisis like this did emerge, we'd be apply to pull them off and rapidly apply them so that we could adapt to the particular problem in question," says Bryan Lewis, a computational epidemiologist at Virginia Tech's Bioinformatics Institute.
Recent models for the potential spread of Ebola seemed to show an exponential increase in areas where disease has been rampant, but now there is very preliminary evidence that there might be a self-limiting nature to this virus. Lewis refers to an article in the Journal The Lancet, that suggests that some people, who come in contact with Ebola do not get infected, do not get sick, and do not become carriers
"I think it has the potential to limit the dire forecasts that have been projected by some of these models however it will limit it, but it won't necessarily make it not a problem. It's still a dire situation one way or the other."
Lewis says it will take the Midas team a few days to replicate the study. If it bears out, they will add the information to their predictive models to help guide the work of a wide variety of agencies, the military, and other support groups, in where best to deploy resources to fight Ebola.
