Steven Bellan, a biostatistician from UGA’s College of Public Health, developed a quantitative framework for real-time ZIKV risk assessment that captures uncertainty in case reporting, importations, and vector-human transmission dynamics.
His findings, published recently in BMC Infectious Diseases, reveal that though large metropolitan regions of the United States (such as the Houston metropolitan region and the Texas-Mexico border) are at higher for the transmission of ZIKV, other counties, which are most likely to detect cases are not necessarily the most likely to experience epidemics.
Dr. Bellan’s framework identifies triggers to signal the start of an epidemic based on a policymakers propensity for risk. Such findings can be used to inform the strategic timing and spatial allocation of public health resources to combat ZIKV throughout the US, and highlights the need to develop methods to obtain reliable estimates of key epidemiological parameters.
-
Castro LA, Fox SJ, Chen X, Liu K, Bellan SE, Dimitrov NB, Galvani AP, and LA Meyers (2017). Assessing real-time Zika risk in the United States. BMC Infectious Diseases. (PDF)