Cannon Room, HMS Quad
Speaker: Marc Lipsitch,
PhD
Title: “Responding
to Pandemics: Looking Back, Looking Forward and Trying to Do It Better On the
Fly."
Question: Given a new
emerging disease, what is the appropriate suite of control measures, and how
can they be most effectively applied and monitored?
Quantitative Method: Infectious disease
transmission modeling (ordinary differential equations); statistical
evaluations of historic control measures; optimization approaches.
Medical Impact: Quantitative studies of
modeled pandemics provide general principles for what control measures can work
in what circumstances. Historical
studies allow us to estimate parameters of prior epidemics and to place
potential future ones in parameter space and provide evidence-based plans for
mitigation. Moreover, historical
approaches allow us to test the theoretical predictions for what kinds of
control measures should work. Looking
forward, we are developing techniques to allow rational prioritization of
limited control measures (e.g. vaccines, anti-infectives) to optimally reduce
transmission.
Speaker URL: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/faculty/marc-lipsitch/