{"id":539,"date":"2008-07-24T00:40:52","date_gmt":"2008-07-24T05:40:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=539"},"modified":"2008-07-24T00:41:01","modified_gmt":"2008-07-24T05:41:01","slug":"how-likely-is-an-avian-flu-pandemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=539","title":{"rendered":"How likely is an avian flu pandemic?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Poisson<\/a><\/p>\n

With winter approaching, many governments in the northern hemisphere are stocking up on Tamiflu and fine tuning their civil defense plans to cope with the disruption a bird flu outbreak might cause.<\/p>\n

But how likely is an outbreak? While various groups have written about how a pandemic might happen, Rinaldo Schinazi at the University of Colorado says nobody seems to have bothered to work out the probability of such an event.<\/p>\n

That sounds unforgivable, given the investment that’s going in to tackling the problem. But in some ways it’s understandable. Schinazi says:<\/p>\n

“The occurrence of a pandemic seems to be hopelessly complex in the sense that it depends on a multitude of factors, some known others unknown. Factors mentioned in the literature go from the stability of the current influenza strains to the number of pigs in China! Hence, a model taking into account all known factors would probably be as complex as the phenomenon itself, would not be that accurate and would therefore be useless.<\/em>“<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But Schinazi has taken an entirely different approach:<\/p>\n

“We do not attempt to incorporate into the model any of the factors that are believed to provoke a pandemic. Instead we treat the occurence of a pandemic as a purely random phenomenon.<\/em>“<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And the result is a fascinating read. It turns out there have been only 10 pandemics in the last 300 years. This is the data Schinazi uses to prime his models.<\/p>\n

Assuming a Poisson distribution, the mean time between pandemics is 30 years but the probability that no pandemic occurs in 60 years is 14% .<\/p>\n

Assume a random walk model and the probability that the time between two pandemics is at least 50 years becomes 11% but the probability that this interval is at least 100 years is 8%, which is hardly much less.<\/p>\n

Schinazi’s conclusion is both surprising and re-assuring: the next pandemic might not be as imminent we’ve been led to believe.<\/p>\n

Ref: arxiv.org\/abs\/0807.3524<\/a>: Will the Announced Influenza Pandemic Really Happen?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With winter approaching, many governments in the northern hemisphere are stocking up on Tamiflu and fine tuning their civil defense plans to cope with the disruption a bird flu outbreak might cause. But how likely is an outbreak? While various groups have written about how a pandemic might happen, Rinaldo Schinazi at the University of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-calculatin","category-slimey-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}