What Strategies Are Used for Infectious Disease Prediction?
More Programs and Publications Featuring Dr. Rodney Rohde
In this program:
What are some strategies used for prediction of infectious diseases? Medical laboratory scientist Dr. Rodney Rohde discusses different population areas, wildlife, and methods used for infectious disease prediction.
Transcript
Interviewer:
What strategies are utilized to create these kinds of predictive factors in different environments? Like you just mentioned the testing of water. Do they do it in specific communities, or is it tested in lower income communities? High income communities? What is the strategy for making sure everything is assessed equally?
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
I have some slides on this that actually show the United States and where this wastewater surveillance is being conducted. So yes, typically we try to take these tools, and we try to utilize them in a way that we can do our best at getting our look at high urban areas as well as rural areas. And so there are approaches to that where every state has coverage, and certainly in higher population areas, there may be more reasons to do a suite or a survey of those areas, of those water systems. Whereas if it's in the middle of nowhere with very little human population, we may not do as much. But that's where perhaps we need to be looking for wildlife surveillance or other types of things where it may be important to be monitoring, for example, bats or birds or canines like fox and coyote for rabies or mice for hantavirus or plague, or things like that. So really it's an approach where you try to do it that spends your dollars wisely and that you place the most power for what you're worried about, whether it's environmental, animal, or human. You're using those tools in a smart way as best as you can, and then you hope you can adapt quickly. So if you need to pick up and move to a different area, you can do so in a quick way.
Interviewer:
So there's a lot of talk about AI and everything. So how do you think AI can be utilized in this case for predicting mutations of emerging viral pathogens?
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Well, I certainly will start with I am not an AI expert, that's for sure, but I do see value whenever you have a tool that can decipher, monitor, and look through maybe just bazillions of gigabytes of data that might be coming in from different detection devices or different surveillance tools. I'm not sure how that will work, but I think the value is in the power of having 24-7-365 monitoring where human beings might have a hard time doing that. Think of all the sources of information and data. Slide 2 I mean, you could be looking at wastewater, you could be looking at migration patterns, you could be looking at hospital intake. Are there surges going on in ERs around the world? You could be looking at air quality on and on and on, animal disease, what are the rates of certain things going on in certain countries? And so I think that's the value, at least in my limited understanding of how AI works. So I'm going to approach it from the standpoint of the power and the ability to never be turned off and just having that kind of power there and that ability to police and do surveillance kind of ongoing all the time.
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