New Software App Brings the World Together Against Infectious Disease

Bird flu has been making news headlines lately, but it’s certainly not the only new disease that the world’s health experts worry about. New mutant strains of all kinds of bacterial and viral strains crop up around the globe all the time, and any one of them can—as bird flu has in the last few years—take the human species by surprise, spreading from one community to another while withstanding local doctors’ antibiotics of choice.

However, a new software program called Supramap is helping humans stay a few steps ahead of new killer bugs by continuously pooling health experts’ knowledge from every corner of the globe. Users in any community share timely data on where and how new disease outbreaks are emerging. Even better, they also develop accurate forecasts on where the outbreaks will occur next.

Supramap (courtesy of http://supramap.osu.edu/)

“Scientists all over the world are sequencing viruses’ genetics. What we’re doing is making an evolutionary and geographic map of that information,” says Daniel Janies, the Ohio State University associate professor of biomedical informatics who created Supramap, in an informational video. “We can track how the virus moves from its origins in different hosts around the world over time. It’s essentially something like a weather map of disease.”

Users—typically clinicians, lab researchers, and health officials—register for free via the the Supramap Web site and, once registered, upload data related to pathogens for viewing by users based anywhere else. The program has several hundred users worldwide at present, but Janies hopes to see it expand into the thousands.

“Our hope is people will share data,” Janies said in an April 10 presentation at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. “We hope that users around the world will make different layers of information so we can see how these facets create emerging diseases.”

Suppose new flu cases are appearing in Indonesia. Indonesian physicians could upload to Supramap the genetic makeup of the virus and how the patients contracted it—i.e., from wild animals, from farm animals, etc. Also, the physicians might indicate if they deployed any antibiotics against the strain and found them ineffective.

Doctors elsewhere in the world could then compare the data to records on flu strains in their own communities to see if any match. They could also note if there are ways by which the strain might travel to their own communities—so if the source seemed to be a species of wild birds, researchers could check that bird species’ migratory patterns to see where else they might visit. Places that expect to see those birds will then know to go on high alert.

The same goes for any communities that expect visitors from Indonesia or, conversely, expect residents to visit Indonesia. Supramap allows for uploading information on routes of air and ground traffic. With that data, researchers can assess the trajectory by which a viral infection might travel, and which communities will probably see the virus next.

In like fashion, they will know which antibiotics not to deploy. If patients in Jakarta, Indonesia, are not responding well to a particular antibiotic, then doctors will know to choose another antibiotic to ship to at-risk communities in China and Vietnam. The program did, in fact, facilitate the writing in 2010 of a paper that fairly accurately predicted patterns of drug resistance in outbreaks of influenza.

Janies’ software program addresses a huge global need, as international development organizations and public health agencies on every continent are on constant watch for new outbreaks of H5N1 (“avian flu”) and other related strains. The World Health Organization has been hosting extensive international investigations into the extent to which the H5N1 virus is evolving and thus becoming more easily transmissible from one person to another—some findings of which can be found in multiple flu-related reports that the WHO has published since January.

The WHO likewise worries about tuberculosis. Deaths by tuberculosis have gone way down since 1990, but this disease is still the world’s number-two biggest infectious killer. And drug-resistant tuberculosis pathogens are cropping up in every country that the WHO has surveyed.

Meanwhile, the WHO and other international bodies are making new efforts to work together against disease threats. For example, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has been collaborating with the World Organisation for Animal Health since 2004 to study and curb transmission of disease from farm animals to humans, through the Global Framework for the Control of Transboundary Animal Diseases.

“Global cooperation has improved a lot. In 2007, there was very little sharing of data. I now see a lot of bright spots,” Janies said during his NIH presentation.

FAO officials are alarmed by the increasing proximity of human populations to farm animal populations throughout much of Asia. Also, they fear the mingling of farm animals with wild animals, such as flocks of migrating birds. All these species running into each other means that any pathogens that they carry also mix, possibly combining to form dangerous new strains, like the H1N1 episode that swept the world in 2009.

H1N1 virus (courtesy of CDC.GOV)

“In areas where pigs, birds and people are all living increasingly closer together, that creates the perfect environment for avian influenza viruses to infect pigs, a host where viruses may swap genes and suddenly be passed on to humans in a much more lethal form,” said Scott Newman, an FAO wildlife epidemiologist.

We humans will clearly be in a much better position if we work together. The more that we as a species combine our resources and coordinate our actions, the better a chance we stand of keeping future infectious-disease-related deaths to a minimum.

“Communication will be one of the most challenging tasks during an outbreak and it should be planned well in advance,” the WHO’s Web site states.

Janies would agree with those wise words. That’s why he brought the world Supramap. It’s a facilitator of just the kind of communication and prior planning that the WHO and its allies want to achieve.