Minority Health and Health Equity Archive

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21769

Welcome to the Minority Health and Health Equity Archive (MHHEA), an electronic archive for digital resource materials in the fields of minority health and health disparities research and policy. It is offered as a no-charge resource to the public, academic scholars and health science researchers interested in the elimination of racial and ethnic health disparities.

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Author: search.filters.author.Eubank, StephenSubject: search.filters.subject.Risk Management

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    Modelling disease outbreaks in realistic urban social networks
    (2004) Eubank, Stephen; Guclu, Hasan; Kumar, V.S. Anil; Marathe, Madhav; Srinivasan, Aravind; Toroczkai, Zoltan; Want, Nan
    Here we present a highly resolved agent-based simulation tool (EpiSims), which combines realistic estimates of population mobility,based on census and land-use data, with parameterized models for simulating the progress of a disease within a host and of transmission between hosts10. The simulation generates a largescale,dynamic contact graph that replaces the differential equations of the classic approach. EpiSims is based on the Transportation Analysis and Simulation System (TRANSIMS) developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which produces estimates of social networks based on the assumption that the transportation infrastructure constrains people’s choices about where and when to perform activities11. TRANSIMS creates a synthetic population endowed with demographics such as age and income, consistent with joint distributions in census data. It then estimates positions and activities of all travellers on a second-by-second basis. For more information on TRANSIMS and its availability, see Supplementary Information. The resulting social network is the best extant estimate of the physical contact patterns among large groups of people—alternative methodologies are limited to physical contacts among hundreds of people or non-physical contacts (such as e-mail or citations) among large groups.
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    If Smallpox Strikes Portland...
    (2005) Barrett, Chris; Eubank, Stephen; Smith, James
    The article looks at "EpiSims," an epidemiology simulation model created to study how social networks spread disease. Public health officials have to make choices that could mean life or death for thousands, even millions, of people, as well as massive economic and social disruption. That is why our group at Los Alamos National Laboratory set out to build EpiSims, the largest individual-based epidemiology simulation model ever created. Tracing the activities and contacts of individual disease victims remains an important tool for modern epidemiologists. After we began developing EpiSims in 2000, smallpox was among the first diseases we chose to model because government officials charged with bioterrorism planning and response were faced with several questions and sometimes conflicting recommendations. INSET: Overview/Simulating Society.