Epidemic, bioterrorism study in Las Vegas

the Army’s Fort Riley, Kansas. In 1976, when swine flu was first identified, it was at another Army post, Fort Dix, New Jersey.

The research in Southern Nevada, officially known as “Bio-surveillance in a Highly Mobile Population,” “is all about the potential for more timely and targeted intervention during an outbreak or bioterror attack,” says Nick CerJanic, a QinetiQ director in Las Vegas. “The financial impact, and much more importantly the human toll of a life-threatening virus or an aerosol anthrax attack, increases exponentially with time.”

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 a natural for the study because tens of millions of tourists pass through annually, and there are only a handful of ways they get in and out of town.

So far, the researchers are focused on tourists who exhibit flu-like 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 says. “The greater the volume of data the more you can confirm the validity of the model you are trying to use, so that we would be able to use it down the road to track a rarer disease.”

Since last fall, Cochran has been receiving data from University Medical Center on everyone who has gone to the hospital. The data is limited to the patients’ ZIP codes and ailments, together with patient codes assigned by the hospital that mask the identities of those individuals from the researchers.

Cochran and QinetiQ, in other words, have no way of identifying patients by name or address.

ZIP codes give them an idea where patients come from, which is helpful in attempting to isolate the source of a virus attack. This is particularly true in cases where there is a cluster of individuals from proximate ZIP codes.

“This could help every health organization in town if we see spikes,” says Jim Poulos, UMC’s director of application development and support. “You might be able to prepare supplies and staff for an increase in patients.”

Cochran is hoping that Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center, Valley Hospital Medical Center, and other Southern Nevada hospitals agree to participate, too. The more data gathered, the greater chance that the researchers will succeed.

Kanigher notes that researchers