During a monitoring hearing at the US House of Representatives yesterday, lawmakers grilled health officials over the response to the first Canadian case Ebola and asked them to respond to the idea that many Republicans now-promote the prohibition of flights from West Africa. When Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the restrictions would cause travelers to redirect through other countries, which makes them more difficult to track, representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) came to his defense with a visual aid.
map he presented, illustrating the relative flow of passengers on Ebola-affected countries in West Africa to the rest of the world, came from a article published Sept. 2 in PLOS Currents: outbreaks . One of its authors, the physicist Alessandro Vespignani of Northeastern University in Boston, said he did not know his work was featured in the debate until some colleagues have warned him yesterday. The map shows the complexity of the global travel flows, he said, but in the rest of the document, "we are more quantitative than that." The authors gathered this flight information with equations describing the dynamics of probable transmission in 16 countries high risk of Ebola virus importation to predict the likelihood that each will see a new imported case. According to the most recent forecast of the group, the risk of another infected person arriving in the US on October 31 given the current reductions air traffic is about 25%. the published work simulates how the reduction of travel can reduce the spread of the disease at this time, their estimates assume an overall 80% reduction in travel Vespignani but notes that the reduction of traffic is just "putting off the problem for a finite amount of time." (The 80% decline is equivalent to a delay of 3 to 4 weeks in a probable case, he said.) "This debate is not to divert the discussion from the real issue, which is to win the battle in Africa" .
Ira Longini, a biostatistician at the University of Florida in Gainesville and another author on the paper PLOS , said he thinks "it's fine" for the Congress to use the work an audience, but deplores the fact that "people are notoriously bad on the interpretation of probability." plots show the group how the probability of new imported cases would fall if the flow of travelers has decreased, but did not wade into the complex costs and benefits of a travel ban. "You can point on this plot and argue both ways," says Longini. The group plans to issue a new document next week that looks at the impact of travel restrictions that some airlines and governments have already imposed. "They can point to one side," he said
* Ebola files :. Given the current Ebola epidemic, unprecedented in terms of the number of people killed and the rapid geographic spread, Science and Science Translational Medicine made a collection of research articles and news on the viral disease available for researchers and the general public
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