In conjunction with collegues in the UK, a University of Adelaide mathematician has developed a model that will help public health authorities better manage future outbreaks of influenza and other new disease outbreaks.

 

Dr Joshua Ross developed the model, which makes use of a wide range of information about infected households during a pandemic to enable improved estimates of the severity of the outbreak and the likely spread of infection.

 

The model will be made available to health authorities around the world in a bid to help them produce a more informed response and aid decision-making.

 

"During a pandemic, government health agencies need to make decisions concerning the likely demands on the health system, whether there is a need for any social isolation measures, whether antivirals should be given and how widely," said Dr Ross.

 

"Our modelling provides a much clearer picture of how much infection there is within the population, with an improved understanding of the transmissibility of the disease and the probability of different clinical outcomes."

 

In conjunction with researchers from the UK, Dr Ross used data recorded during the outbreak of the swine flu to estimate probabilities related to the number of infected individuals presenting symptoms, the numbers of those with symptoms seeking medical help and having a laboratory diagnostic test, and the accuracy of the test.

 

"Traditionally, information on individual clinical outcomes is simplified to binary data - an individual is infected or not," Dr Ross said. "This new approach uses all these different levels of recorded data to develop a model that fits the whole process; combining this with modern statistical methods we are able to make much more accurate estimates about transmissibility and clinical outcomes.

 

"This would have been very valuable in the 2009 pandemic where the variable severity - often mild in nature - meant low rates of confirmation of cases. That posed problems for health authorities in determining an appropriate management response overseas and in Australia."