Taiwan Novel (Seasonal) Influenza Surveillance System for Assessing Vaccines, Antiviral Drugs, and Intervention Strategies

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), up to two billion people will be susceptible to the next high pathogenic influenza virus, and the mortality rate from such a virus will be close to 100%. According to WHO surveillance reports, a novel influenza virus is inevitable, yet it is impossible to predict when and in what form the virus will invade individual countries or how it will threaten people’s health. Therefore, a need exists for a surveillance platform to analyze the efficacies of three prevention/intervention strategies (vaccines, antiviral drugs, and isolating infected individuals) and to assess application strategies and timing. During the proposed three-year investigation we will use a combination of surveys and in-depth interviews with sociologists to develop a general-purpose daily contact network model and to analyze its topological properties. Composed of multiple interconnected individuals and locations, daily-contact social networks can be used to represent such social phenomena as long-distance movement, daily visits to fixed locations, and inter-area transportation. We will use an underlying daily contact network structure with an agent-based simulation approach, a geographic information system, and a SEIR compartmental model to develop a network oriented influenza surveillance system to simulate transmission dynamics and diffusion scenarios based on a range of seeding events. After validating the surveillance system, it will be used to assess the efficacies of prevention and intervention policies to determine the best vaccine and antiviral drug strategies in response to a novel influenza virus and their second-order social emergence.

Project ID:PC9808-0525
External Project ID:NSC98-2314-B182-043