Evaluating pandemic risk

Improving pandemic influenza risk assessment

Assessing the pandemic risk posed by specific non-human influenza A viruses is an important goal in public health research. As influenza virus genome sequencing becomes cheaper, faster, and more readily available, the ability to predict pandemic potential from sequence data could transform pandemic influenza risk assessment capabilities. However, the complexities of the relationships between vi...

Risk communications: in search of a pandemic.

This paper explores the difficulties in managing risk communications in the face of uncertainty of an avian flu pandemic over a protracted period. The communications effort has also been made more difficult by the confusion and cacophony in the media and claims by experts and politicians worldwide. While Singapore secured much praise for its handling of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SA...

The Loss from Pandemic Influenza Risk

Pandemic H5N1: Receding Risk or Coming Catastrophe?

Rarely do arguments about the meaning of serosurveillance data bear directly upon potentially preventing billions of deaths. But this has been the case in attempts at making sense of more than 50 serologic studies of human antibody to avian H5N1 viruses in exposed and unexposed human populations from countries in which H5N1 has been circulating in poultry [1–4]. Sixteen years since highly patho...

Seasonality in risk of pandemic influenza emergence

Influenza pandemics can emerge unexpectedly and wreak global devastation. However, each of the six pandemics since 1889 emerged in the Northern Hemisphere just after the flu season, suggesting that pandemic timing may be predictable. Using a stochastic model fit to seasonal flu surveillance data from the United States, we find that seasonal flu leaves a transient wake of heterosubtypic immunity...