COVID-19 Math
Interesting video on exponential growth, logistic curves, contagious disease and COVID-19 from the always enlightening 3Blue1Brown.
Tag: Contagious Disease
A universal flu vaccine
Wired reports: Today, independent teams reported inScience and Nature Medicine how they’ve tinkered with a piece of viral protein so it can teach immune systems—in this case, in mice, ferrets, and monkeys—to fight whole groups of viruses rather than just a single strain. “It’s a great first step in the road for generating a universal…
Cholera and Haiti
Cholera has been a huge problem for Haiti. The excellent investigative journalist and author Rose George reports: Five years on, cholera has killed nearly 9,000 Haitians. More than 730,000 people have been infected. It is the worst outbreak of the disease, globally, in modern history. In 2014, Cholera was on the verge of being eradicated from Haiti:…
Some good news
The Ebola epidemic in Liberia has ended according to the WHO. The NY Times reports: “The outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Liberia is over,” the W.H.O. said in a statement read by Dr. Alex Gasasira, the group’s representative to Liberia, in a packed conference room at the emergency command center in Monrovia, the capital.…
How to Survive a Plague
Last weekend, I watched the movie How to Survive a Plague. The movie discusses the AIDS activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). Although I am not a movie critic (you can see reviews by professional critics here), I do want to discuss one key issue that the move discusses: should the FDA liberalize its…
Good News in the Fight Against HIV
Almost one in five South Africans have HIV. South Africa is the country with the most individuals living with HIV (5.6 million); it also has the most HIV deaths annually (310,000). Despite these grim facts, there is some good news. The Economist reports: “Although the number of South Africans living with the disease continues to…
World TB Day 2010
Today, March 24th, is World Tuberculosis Day. According to UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon, there were 9.4 million new TB cases in 2008 and 1.8 million deaths. The CDC website has more information on what can be done to stop the spread of TB. There is lots of coverage of the TB Day activities from…
Swine Flu: Public Health Emergency in the U.S. and Mexico
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared Swine Flu to be an international public health emergency. MÉXICO La Jornada claims that there swine flu has killed 81 people in México and infected 1324. The entire country of México has closed schools until May 6th according to La Prensa: “El gobierno federal ordenó la suspensión de misas, clases–hasta el 6…
Multidrug Resistant Tuberculosis in Russia
Merrill Goozner writes about MDR-TB in Russia in a four-part feature article in Scientific American.
Network Structure and the Spread of Disease
Contagious disease are spread (generally) when one person comes in contact with another. Thus, the number of links in a network (the number of connections one has) will go a long way to determining how fast diseases are spread. One question which needs to be answered is whether a hub-and-spoke network or a more diffused…