Researchers at NIH have developed software that will be distributed at no-cost to help public health officials better understand disease outbreaks and more effectively halt the spread of an epidemic, Government Health IT reports.
The software, called TranStat, is intended to help communities prepare for pandemic flu, smallpox, SARS and other infectious diseases, according to NIH officials.
Public health officials enter into the program information about infected individuals, such as:
- Age;
- Sex;
- When their symptoms began;
- People with whom they were in contact; and
- Steps taken to curb the symptoms or spread of the disease.
Identifying information, such as names, is not collected, according to officials.
The software then determines the probability that one individual contracted the disease from another (Ferris,
Government Health IT, 12/6).
In addition, TranStat can estimate in real time the number of people an individual could infect, and the rate at which infection occurs in particular settings (
ANI/Yahoo! News India, 12/7).
The software will be enhanced in the future to allow field employees to enter more specific data about the infected populations and their social networks.
TranStat was developed by an NIH-sponsored research program called the Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study. The researchers used the software to analyze an outbreak of avian flu in Indonesia in 2006 (
Government Health IT, 12/6).