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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday May 20 2015, @06:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the does-a-bad-attitude-qualify dept.

Machine learning can pinpoint rodent species that harbor diseases andgeographic hotspots vulnerable to new parasites and pathogens. So reports a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences led by Barbara A. Han, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of EcosystemStudies.

Most emerging infectious diseases are transmitted from animals to humans, with more than a billion people suffering annually. Safeguarding public health requires effective surveillance tools.

With University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology colleagues John Paul Schmidt, Sarah E. Bowden, and John M. Drake, Han employed machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to reveal patterns in an extensive set of data on more than 2,000 rodent species, with variables describing species' life history, ecology, behavior, physiology, and geographic distribution.

The team developed a model that was able to predict known rodent reservoir species with 90% accuracy, and identified particular traits that distinguish reservoirs from non-reservoirs. They revealed over 150 new potential rodent reservoir species and more than 50 new hyper-reservoirs - animals that may carry multiple pathogens infectious to humans.

http://phys.org/news/2015-05-future-infectious-disease-outbreaks.html

[Abstract]: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/05/14/1501598112

[Source]: http://www.caryinstitute.org/newsroom/forecasting-future-infectious-disease-outbreaks

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Joe on Wednesday May 20 2015, @10:56PM

    by Joe (2583) on Wednesday May 20 2015, @10:56PM (#185773)

    I only looked as far as the Lancet paper since they list some of the emerging zoonotic infections, including influenza and a quick search said ~15% of people get sick per year.
    I'll have to look into that ILRI report because the combined table is around 2.45 billion affected humans per year (a lot bigger than I expected) and that obviously doesn't match very well with the 1 billion number.

    - Joe

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @06:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @06:02AM (#185910)

    If it really means something like 1/3 of people get diarrhea at least once each year it could make sense. We need the methodology from the primary data source to interpret that number. And also, it is odd to round down from over 2 billion to 1 billion.