Google.org Battles Bugs & Viruses, Pandemic, FluTrackers.com

[sharon sanders]

Not one of these groups has ever donated a penny to FluTrackers. Obviously we are not in The Club.

Google.org Battles Bugs & Viruses

[SIZE=-1] Announces More Than $14 Million in Grants to Partners Working to Predict and Prevent the Next Pandemic

Mountain View, Calif. (October 21, 2008) — Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), has announced grants of more than $14 million to support partners working in Southeast Asia and Africa to prevent the next pandemic. Google.org's Predict and Prevent initiative is supporting efforts to identify hot spots where diseases may emerge, detect new pathogens circulating in animal and human populations, and respond to outbreaks before they become global crises. Several new lethal infectious diseases crop up every year. Examples include the well-known killers, HIV/AIDS, bird flu, and SARS, as well as drug-resistant strains of ancient scourges malaria and tuberculosis. Three-quarters of new diseases are zoonoses, meaning they've jumped from animals to humans.

"Business as usual won't prevent the next AIDS or SARS. The teams we're funding today are on the frontiers of digital and genetic early detection technology. We hope that their work, with partners across environmental, animal, and human health boundaries, will help solve centuries-old problems and save millions of lives," said Dr. Larry Brilliant, Executive Director, Google.org.

Identifying hot spots
Knowing where to look is critical to disease surveillance. Climate change and deforestation increase human-animal contact, and with it, disease spreads. "The holy grail is to predict disease outbreaks before they happen. For Rift Valley fever and malaria, long-term weather forecasts and deforestation maps can show us where to look for outbreaks, up to six months in advance," said Frank Rijsberman, Program Director, Google.org.

• The Woods Hole Research Center - $2 million multi-year grant to support high-resolution satellite mapping of forests to enhance monitoring of forest loss and settlement expansion in tropical countries. WHRC will create information to share with environmental and human experts so they can better anticipate the emergence of infectious diseases. For more information, please visit http://www.whrc.org/.
• Columbia University International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) - $900,000 multi-year grant to improve the use of forecasts, rainfall data and other climate information in East Africa, and link weather and climate experts to health specialists so they can better predict outbreaks of infectious diseases. For more information, please visit http://portal.iri.columbia.edu/portal/server.pt.
• University Corporation for Atmospheric Research - $900,000 multi-year grant to build and implement a system that will use weather projections to inform and target response to disease threats in West Africa. For more information, please visit http://www.ucar.edu/.

Detecting diseases earlier
Genetic detection filters viral information in DNA to uncover deadly new pathogens, and digital detection mines online data to reveal early signals of possible epidemics. "We want to stop viruses dead in their tracks – their animal tracks – before they jump to humans," noted Dr. Mark Smolinski, Google.org's Threat Detective.

• Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (GVFI) - $5.5 million multi-year grant (with equal funding from the Skoll Foundation) to support the collection and analysis of blood samples of humans and animals in hot spots within Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, China, Malaysia, Lao PDR and Madagascar. The GVFI team, headed by Dr. Nathan Wolfe, has demonstrated that potentially pathogenic animal viruses jump more frequently to humans than previously believed and will work to detect early evidence of future pandemics. For more information, please visit http://gvfi.org/index.html.
• Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health - $2.5 million multi-year grant to support research to accelerate the discovery of new pathogens, and to enable rapid, regional response to outbreaks by establishing molecular diagnostics in hot spot countries including Sierra Leone and Bangladesh. Dr. Ian Lipkin and colleagues have discovered more than 75 viruses to date, established critical links between infection and the development of acute and chronic diseases, including pneumonia, meningitis/encephalitis, cancer, and mental illness. For more information, please visit http://cii.columbia.edu/.
• Children's Hospital Corporation supporting Healthmap and ProMED-mail - $3M multi-year grant to combine HealthMap's digital detection efforts with ProMED-mail's global network of human, animal, and ecosystem health specialists. Together, these programs will assess current emerging disease reporting systems, expand regional networks in Africa and Southeast Asia, and develop new tools to improve the detection and reporting of outbreaks. For more information please visit http://www.childrenshospital.org/, http://www.healthmap.org/en, and http://www.promedmail.org/pls/otn/f?p=2400:1000:.

"On every continent, viruses move from animals into people. GVFI's mission is to monitor this viral exchange. Working in animal markets, with restaurant workers, and with hunters at the end of the road, we sort through this traffic to try to stop deadly diseases before they spread," said Dr. Nathan Wolfe, Founder and Director, Global Viral Forecasting Initiative.
For more information and a Google Earth Layer highlighting the grantees, please visit http://www.google.org/predict.html.
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http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20081021_googleorg.html

 

[Giuseppe]

Re: Google.org Battles Bugs & Viruses, Pandemic, FluTrackers.com

Pandemics: Google takes on real viruses [guardian.co.uk]

Pandemics: Google takes on real viruses

The search giant Google has pledged to fund research aimed at detecting and preventing virulent new diseases


* Bobbie Johnson, San Francisco
* guardian.co.uk,
* Tuesday October 21 2008 12.46 BST

Google has pledged to try to stop the next global pandemic by investing $15m in a series of hi-tech health schemes.

Money from the internet giant will provide funding for six projects that aim to detect new diseases and understand the conditions that help them spread ? potentially saving millions of lives in the process.

"Business as usual won't prevent the next Aids or Sars," said Dr Larry Brilliant, the executive director of Google.org.

"The teams we're funding today are on the frontiers of digital and genetic early-detection technology."

In the first round of grants, $15m (?8.8m) is being spread among organisations working to identify and prevent infectious diseases that have the potential to become global pandemics.

Among the biggest beneficiaries is the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, a group that collects blood samples from humans and animals around the world in order to spot dangerous pathogens that leap from animals to humans.

Examples of pandemic diseases that have followed this route include HIV, Sars and bird flu ? even if the link has taken years or even decades to be determined.

The initiative will receive $5.5m from Google.org in order to expand its remit.

Its founder, Dr Nathan Wolfe, said that the development could have a huge impact.

"Every hour, on every continent, viruses move from animals into people," he said. "Working in animal markets, with restaurant workers and with hunters at the end of the road, we sort through this traffic to stop deadly diseases before they spread."

Google will also be contributing $2.5m to a scheme run by the Mailman School of Public Health, based at Columbia University in New York, which aims to speed up its programme to discover new pathogens.

The other organisations receiving grants as part of the announcement include the International Research Institute for Climate and Society ? also at Columbia ? and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which will both receive $900,000 to improve weather prediction and forecasting.

Although it may not appear that the weather has a strong influence on the spread of diseases, Google.org programme director Frank Rijsberman said it was crucial to improve forecasting in conjunction with the identification of disease "hot spots" across Africa and south-east Asia.

"We think it has a critical role to play," he said. "For example, the last major outbreak of Rift Valley Fever in Kenya ? which affects cattle and spills over into people ? was actually predicted several months in advance through a weather forecast. It was going to be wet, and that meant there were going to be a lot more mosquitos, and the mosquitos ? if they reach a certain threshold ? were likely to pass on the disease."

The Woods Hole Research Center, based in Massachusetts, will receive $2m to produce satellite images of forests in the developing world to help understand how the environment affects the spread of diseases.

Google has pledged to contribute 1% of all its profits to charity, as well as giving Google.org 3m shares in the parent company ? currently valued at more than $1bn.

As part of its wide-ranging mission to develop new ideas in energy, the environment and global poverty, the organisation has already made significant investments in geothermal energy, solar technologies and wind power.Rijsberman said that how much more was put into these schemes would depend on how successful they become.

"In renewable energy we have started with large investments, while in this initiative we have started with grants but expect to move into investments in diagnostics companies later. Over the next several years we expect some of them might be more successful than others, or we might find better ways of putting our resources to work."
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<cite cite="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/21/google-healthcare">Pandemics: Google takes on real viruses | Technology | guardian.co.uk</cite>

 

[Giuseppe]

Re: Google.org Battles Bugs & Viruses, Pandemic, FluTrackers.com

Deep in the Rain Forest, Stalking the Next Pandemic [NYT]

Deep in the Rain Forest, Stalking the Next Pandemic

By ELIZABETH SVOBODA
Published: October 20, 2008


For Nathan Wolfe, a 38-year-old visiting professor at Stanford, an ordinary workday can look like a clip from “Survivor” — chasing primate hunters through the dense foliage of rural Cameroon, sloshing through mud and streams, dodging branches and malaria-carrying mosquitoes.



Dr. Wolfe says he enjoys the adventure. But he has a broader purpose: staving off global pandemics before they happen.

The subsistence, or “bushmeat,” hunters he tracks face a singular occupational hazard: their blood often mingles with that of their prey. Because animals like chimpanzees and orangutans are genetically similar to humans, the likelihood of virus transmission between species is very high.

Both H.I.V. and Ebola, for example, have documented primate origins, and a paper published in Nature in February noted that 60 percent of emerging human pathogens came from animals.

“We’re starting to expand the watershed of global disease control,” Dr. Wolfe said. “Before, the best thing you could do was develop a vaccine, but now people are recognizing that’s not going to be enough.

“If you find diseases before they’ve really emerged,” he continued, “you can control them early on, before you get a major epidemic.”

That pre-emptive-strike approach to epidemic management, he said, is what makes chasing the Cameroonian hunters so crucial.

When he can persuade the hunters, whom he calls “sentinels,” to supply him with blood samples, he can form a better idea of which new animal diseases they are exposed to — and, by extension, which emerging viruses could pose the biggest threat to humans.

Since he began his hunter studies, he has come across several viruses never before seen in humans, including retroviruses from the same family as H.I.V.

“With epidemics, people have been standing on the shore, waiting for the gusher to hit the ocean,” Dr. Wolfe said, referring to the tidal-wave impact a widespread epidemic could have around the world. “But to prevent epidemics, you have to look at the various little sources that feed into the river."

With the goal of identifying more of these “little sources” — new disease-causing pathogens — and choking them off, Dr. Wolfe started the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative this year. If new disease strains could be culled before they had a chance to take hold in humans, he reasoned, health organizations would have to spend less money and energy on developing expensive vaccines and treatment drugs.

Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, is announcing Tuesday that it will contribute $5.5 million to the initiative; that is being matched by $5.5 million from the Skoll Foundation, which supports the work of social entrepreneurs.


“Nathan is going to be a rock star in this field,” said Frank Rijsberman, a Google.org program director. “We have high hopes he’ll discover 5 to 10 new viruses within the next few years.”

While outsiders and colleagues alike have endorsed Dr. Wolfe’s forecasting tactics, putting them into practice is a tall order. After his team arrives in a rural Cameroonian village on a rickety bus, its first task is to convince local populations that the research poses no threat to their way of life.

“People can’t always see a connection between diseases and wild animals,” said Matthew LeBreton, a research coordinator who designs field education programs for the villagers. “And they sometimes think that we’re going to have their meat confiscated. If someone talks to them about bushmeat, that’s what they’re going to hear.”

Once rapport is established, the data collection can begin. Technicians supply the hunters with bits of filter paper, which they use to absorb blood dripping from their prey. At the same time, scientists take blood samples from the hunters themselves. All of the samples are tested for unfamiliar viruses.

“The main things we look for are: Does a particular virus cause disease, and is it transmissible?” Dr. Wolfe said. “We know there are certain types of viruses that are nasty — influenza, for instance, is an area that is not a blindside. But a lot of viruses have come out of nowhere, like H.I.V., or to a certain extent SARS. Because we know we have the potential to be blindsided, we really have to investigate the unknowns.”

To map the emergence of novel viruses, Dr. Wolfe and his colleagues in the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative — more than 100 scientists in nine countries — have begun following other sentinel populations, like people who receive frequent blood transfusions. They have recently expanded their investigations of viruses that cross the animal-human barrier, conducting research in field locations in China, Madagascar, Malaysia and Paraguay.
Deep in the Rain Forest, Stalking the Next Pandemic

Thanks to new techniques for sequencing DNA in the viruses they find, epidemiologists can quickly identify the most virulent new pathogens — the ones that have high mutation rates or lend themselves to recombination, in which strands of DNA are broken and then joined to other genetic material. A new variant of influenza, for instance, could be dangerous, but it could cause epidemics only if it were genetically capable of staying one step ahead of the immune system’s defenses.

Tracking the viral mix in a given population over time is also critical, said Forest Rohwer, a microbiologist at San Diego State University who works with Dr. Wolfe.

“Imagine you’re doing routine monitoring of an area,” Dr. Rohwer said. “If you take 100 different blood samples a day to look at the viruses in those 100 samples, and at some point you see a shift away from what you normally see in that system, then you can say, ‘O.K., there’s something wrong here; let’s look at it in depth.’ ”

Once a harmful virus has been located, the next step is to determine how quickly it can spread. Dr. Wolfe’s colleagues and other scientists have developed computer simulations that can be customized to take account of population size and density, family size and transportation patterns.

“You create a population of individuals and then make the rules for how they move around based on your data,” said Dr. Donald S. Burke, dean of the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health, who helped create some of these simulations. “It’s like SimEpi.”

The simulation then predicts how a virus with a given set of transmissibility properties will thrive in a particular environment. Once Dr. Wolfe and his colleagues isolate a new virus or variant that seems to be spreading in a small area, they can zero in on its primary characteristics — the likelihood that a sick person will infect someone else, for instance — and feed the data into the simulation to generate an idea of how the virus could spread.


The results offer a rough but valuable estimate of how and where a nascent epidemic could take hold. So far, simulations show that for all but the most virulent new pathogens, there is “a reasonable combination of policy options well within the range of the health authorities that, if prepared in advance and implemented quickly, could stop a global disaster,” Dr. Burke said, adding, “If that’s the case, then by God, we better get ready.”

Dr. Wolfe acknowledges that the task of preparing for the next pandemic is gargantuan — far too big for his team alone.

“What we’re doing is our best guess on the ideal way to create an early warning system, but there are going to be 20 or 30 different approaches tried,” he said. “The field of pandemic prevention will become huge over the next few years, funded on the order of billions of dollars. It’s going to be a new movement.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/health/research/21prof.html?_r=1&bl&ex=1224734400&en=fea66d67165b8c74&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin
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