America.gov (Washington, DC)
Cheryl Pellerin
10 November 2008
The relationship between people and pandemics is evolving — from the helpless deaths of millions from bubonic plague in the 1340s through the H1 avian-to-human influenza in 1918-1919 to the hard-fought standoff among birds and people in outbreaks of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian flu.
The next logical step is prevention, and Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the company behind the world's most popular search engine, is supporting efforts to identify hot spots where diseases might emerge and to detect new pathogens circulating in animals and people.
"Business as usual won't prevent the next AIDS or SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome]," Google.org Executive Director Dr. Larry Brilliant said in a prepared statement. "The teams we're funding today are on the frontiers of digital and genetic early-detection technology."
KNOWING WHERE TO LOOK
Knowing where to look is critical to effective disease surveillance, and climate has a critical role in determining the distribution in Africa of such epidemic-potential diseases as malaria and meningitis. Their transmission in certain places can depend on climatic conditions like rainfall, humidity and temperature, and environmental factors.
In this work, the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Research Center and its partners are receiving $2 million for high-resolution satellite mapping of forests to enhance monitoring of forest loss and settlement expansion in tropical countries. Woods Hole scientists will create information to share with environmental and human health experts so they can anticipate more effectively the emergence of infectious diseases.
At Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) in New York, which receives support from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists are receiving $900,000 from Google.org to improve the use of forecasts, rainfall data and other climate information in East Africa and link weather and climate experts with health specialists to better predict disease outbreaks.
Italian veterinarians prepare to take samples from a live heron found in Sicily in 2006.
"Although we have a lot of scientists working on developing global models to help predict the climate," IRI senior research scientist Madeleine Thomson told America.gov, "the information won't go anywhere unless people have the capacity to use that information. We put a lot of work into building capacity in the meteorology services to give useful information to those in the health sector, and work with health decision makers on how best to understand, use and request the information they need."
MALARIA AND MENINGITIS
IRI will work in Ethiopia, focusing initially on malaria and meningitis. An initial focus of the grant is to fund two scientists from Ethiopia's National Meteorological Agency to receive six months of training at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom to improve Ethiopia's rainfall data sets.
Another Ethiopian scientist has arrived at IRI to develop forecasting tools for seasonal climate variability tailored to the needs of the health community. The project will lead to the development of disease-mapping tools and other applications.
Collaborators in the work are the Intergovernmental Authority on Development's Climate Prediction and Applications Center, World Health Organization (WHO), Ethiopian Anti-Malaria Association and Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
"The project in Ethiopia is being mirrored through a regional climate center in Nairobi [Kenya]," Thomson said. "This will enable the experience in Ethiopia to be shared with all the other countries in the greater Horn of Africa."
IRI is also a technical consultant on another Google.org grant -- $900,000 to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado to build a decision-support system that public health workers can use to anticipate and respond to meningitis epidemics in Ghana.
The project is working with the WHO-led Meningitis Environmental Risk Information Technologies consortium of climate and health institutions that supports the distribution of a new meningitis vaccine in Africa.
"We know meningitis is in some way linked to the environment because big epidemics occur in semiarid areas like the African Sahel during the dry season," Thomson said. "The idea of this partnership is to bring the health and climate communities together and focus the research efforts to contribute to a much bigger picture. If there is a climate component to the disease that can be used operationally, we can work it out and make that information available to the health sector."
More information about Google.org's Predict and Prevent initiative is available on the organization's Web site.
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