A multimillion-dollar research project involving the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, could help better protect U.S. troops. But it is also expected to shore up the Las Vegas area against epidemics and bioterrorism.
UNLV Associate Professor Chris Cochran is helping lead the effort and hopes it will help hospitals and public health officials quickly identify sources and pathways of influenza, E. coli and other contagious pathogens that can quickly spread through a population.
Suppose Clark County health officials learned that a group of tourists with the flu in Las Vegas arrived by plane the previous day from Anytown, USA. Because symptoms don't usually appear until two or three days after infection, it's likely the tourists contracted the virus back home. Health officials could issue flu alerts to authorities in Anytown, and to the airlines that brought the visitors to Nevada, to help prevent a more widespread outbreak.
Or say the tourists had been in town a week before their flu symptoms appeared. If health officials knew where they stayed, hotels could be contacted to contain the virus, and protect other guests and workers.
Southern Nevada health professionals would be able to obtain this kind of information if Cochran, a member of UNLV's School of Public Health, and Defense Department contractor QinetiQ North America succeed in developing computer software sought by the U.S. Army.
The research in southern Nevada is officially known as "Bio-surveillance in a Highly Mobile Population."
The three-year project is expected to last at least two more years under the guidance of QinetiQ (pronounced "kinetic"), a subsidiary of a London-based company with offices in Las Vegas. So far, $3.6 million in military spending has been appropriated for the project.
The Pentagon is involved because it has a stake in knowing the source of illness among its troops. It wants to know whether the source was a particular ship, military base, battlefield location or somewhere else that needs to be addressed. The military also wants to guard against unwittingly spreading a disease when soldiers return home.
The 1918 "Spanish flu" pandemic was first observed in the U.S. at the Army's Fort Riley, Kan. In 1976, when swine flu was first identified, it was at another Army post, Fort Dix, N.J.
Nick CerJanic, a QinetiQ director in Las Vegas, said the project aims to allow for timely and targeted intervention during an outbreak or bioterror attack.
"The financial impact, and much more importantly the human toll of a life-threatening virus or an aerosol anthrax attack, increases exponentially with time," he said.
To simulate the limited war zone entrances to and exits from Iraq and Afghanistan, Cochran and QinetiQ are working on computer models that aim to track tourists who wind up in Las Vegas hospitals. Las Vegas is seen as a good site for study because tens of millions of tourists pass through annually, and there are only a handful of ways to get in and out of town.
So far, the researchers are focused on tourists who exhibit flulike illnesses while in town.
"The reason we're using influenza-like illnesses is that we are going to see far more cases of that than we are rare diseases," Cochran said.
Since last fall, Cochran has been receiving patients ZIP code and ailment data from University Medical Center in Las Vegas, with patient codes assigned by the hospital to mask patients' individual identities from researchers.
Jim Poulos, UMC director of application development and support, said the ability to identify spikes can help health organizations prepare supplies and staff for an increase in patients.
Cochran hopes other southern Nevada hospitals and resorts will participate to broaden the data sample and help pinpoint the source of an outbreak.
Cochran said he recognized the priority that hotels put on guest confidentiality, and said he knows properties don't want to be identified as the site of infection.
But he said it would benefit hotels to participate, "because the quicker they know something is going on, the faster they can make corrections."
Researchers also are trying to compile social modeling data to estimate the number of people a typical tourist comes in contact with while in town — in an elevator, at a card table, walking the Strip, at a show, in a bar.
Likewise, Cochran and QinetiQ would like to collect passenger information from airlines to help tell whether an outbreak could be linked to a particular flight. The whole point is to trace the path of the virus.
"Tourism professionals in Las Vegas already invest significant resources to ensure the health and safety of our visitors," CerJanic says. "Both UNLV and QinetiQ North America expect to leverage the results of this project to benefit the vital industry of Las Vegas to better protect their guests and workers."
UMC shares certain early-warning information on contagious diseases with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta through the CDC's BioSense program, a national health surveillance network.
This network identifies the existence of outbreaks in specific communities, but not the source of the virus or the paths it took to reach a particular city, as Cochran is seeking to accomplish.
"What we want to be able to do is to drill further into the data so we can find where the people came from," Cochran said. "The more information we can gather on tourists the better."
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Information from: Las Vegas Sun, http://www.lasvegassun.com