Related papers: Computer-assisted vaccine design
The threat of avian influenza and the 2004-2005 influenza vaccine supply shortage in the United States has sparked a debate about optimal vaccination strategies to reduce the burden of morbidity and mortality caused by the influenza virus.…
The advent and subsequent widespread availability of preventive vaccines has altered the course of public health over the past century. Despite this success, effective vaccines to prevent many high-burden diseases, including HIV, have been…
Pathogen genome data offers valuable structure for spatial models, but its utility is limited by incomplete sequencing coverage. We propose a probabilistic framework for inferring genetic distances between unsequenced cases and known…
Knowledge of the severity of an influenza outbreak is crucial for informing and monitoring appropriate public health responses, both during and after an epidemic. However, case-fatality, case-intensive care admission and…
Most antigenically novel and evolutionarily successful strains of seasonal influenza A (H3N2) originate in East, South, and Southeast Asia. To understand this pattern, we simulated the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of influenza in a…
The Influenza virus can be considered as one of the most severe viruses that can infect multiple species with often fatal consequences to the hosts. The Hemagglutinin (HA) gene of the virus can be a target for antiviral drug development…
Public health surveillance systems often fail to detect emerging infectious diseases, particularly in resource limited settings. By integrating relevant clinical and internet-source data, we can close critical gaps in coverage and…
Viral mutations pose significant threats to public health by increasing infectivity, strengthening vaccine resistance, and altering disease severity. To track these evolving patterns, agencies like the CDC annually evaluate thousands of…
Influenza A is a serious disease that causes significant morbidity and mortality, and vaccines against the seasonal influenza disease are of variable effectiveness. In this paper, we discuss use of the $p_{\rm epitope}$ method to predict…
Background: Influenza A/H3N2 has been circulating in humans since 1968, causing considerable morbidity and mortality. Although H3N2 incidence is highly seasonal, how such seasonality contributes to global phylogeographic migration dynamics…
When analysing in vitro data, growth kinetics of influenza strains are often compared by computing their growth rates, which are sometimes used as proxies for fitness. However, analogous to mechanistic epidemic models, the growth rate can…
We study the spatio-temporal patterns of the proportion of influenza B out of laboratory confirmations of both influenza A and B, with data from 139 countries and regions downloaded from the FluNet compiled by the World Health Organization,…
H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has been recently circulating in previously unseen patterns. As the underlying causes are uncertain, we need a better understanding of the drivers of virus circulation, as they underpin the…
Human seasonal influenza viruses evolve rapidly, enabling the virus population to evade immunity and re-infect previously infected individuals. Antigenic properties are largely determined by the surface glycoprotein hemagglutinin (HA) and…
The emerging threat of a human pandemic caused by the H5N1 avian influenza virus strain magnifies the need for controlling the incidence of H5N1 infection in domestic bird populations. Culling is one of the most widely used control measures…
Determining phenotype from genetic data is a fundamental challenge. Influenza A viruses undergo rapid antigenic drift and identification of emerging antigenic variants is critical to the vaccine selection process. Using former seasonal…
A principal component analysis of a multiple sequence alignement of hemagglutinin sequences of subtype H1 has been performed, the sequences being encoded using the amino-acid property that maximizes the weight of the major component. In the…
Background: Globally, influenza is a major cause of morbidity, hospitalization and mortality. Influenza vaccination has shown substantial protective effectiveness in the United States. We investigated state-level patterns of coverage rates…
Safe and effective preventive vaccines have the potential to help stem the HIV epidemic. The efficacy of such vaccines is typically measured in randomized, double-blind phase IIb/III trials and described as a reduction in newly acquired HIV…
Seasonal influenza presents an ongoing challenge to public health. The rapid evolution of the flu virus necessitates annual vaccination campaigns, but the decision to get vaccinated or not in a given year is largely voluntary, at least in…