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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    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.
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    A New Tool for Epidemiology: The Usefulness of Dynamic Agent Models in Understanding Place Effects on Health
    (2008) Auchincloss, Amy H.; Diez Roux, Ana V.
    A major focus of recent work on the spatial patterning of health has been the study of how features of residential environments or neighborhoods may affect health. Place effects on health emerge from complex interdependent processes in which individuals interact with each other and their environment and in which both individuals and environments adapt and change over time. Traditional epidemiologic study designs and statistical regression approaches are unable to examine these dynamic processes. These limitations have constrained the types of questions asked, the answers received, and the hypotheses and theoretical explanations that are developed. Agent-based models and other systems-dynamics models may help to address some of these challenges. Agent-based models are computer representations of systems consisting of heterogeneous microentities that can interact and change/adapt over time in response to other agents and features of the environment. Using these models, one can observe how macroscale dynamics emerge from microscale interactions and adaptations. A number of challenges and limitations exist for agent-based modeling. Nevertheless, use of these dynamic models may complement traditional epidemiologic analyses and yield additional insights into the processes involved and the interventions that may be most useful.