Modeling and Risk Assessment. T. Habtemariam, P. Yu, D. Oryang, D. Nganwa, L. Ayanwale, and S. Wilson, College of Veterinary Medicine, Tuskegee University, Tuskegee, AL; R. Fite, R. McDowell, and C. Chioino, USDA-APHIS, Riverdale, MD; and S. Kaplan, Bayesian Systems, Rockville, MD
At the Center for Computational Epidemiology (CCE), our research focuses on the new and emerging science known Computational Epidemiology. The link between epidemiology and risk assessment is natural and intuitive. Combining these two disciplines, we develop quantitative animal and human disease models focused on current public policy issues. Our goal is to provide timely and useful information to decisionmakers. The research includes dynamic and stochastic modeling based on systems analysis, optimization models, multivariate statistical models, expert systems, neural networks and genetic algorithms, risk assessment and risk modeling. We use probabilistic risk assessment to evaluate and quantify epidemiologic pathways of disease agents. With this approach, we have developed risk assessment models for two economically important livestock diseases: foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) and hog cholera (HC). In the case of FMD, we evaluated the probability of FMD virus introduction into the United States via deboned beef or through deboned or bone-in mutton. In the case of HC, we evaluated the probability of hog cholera outbreaks as a result of importation of pork under various waste-feeding scenarios. The epidemiologic, mathematical and computational methods will be discussed.
This work is supported by a grant from USDA-APHIS.
Go to . . .
1999 SRA Table of Contents
1999 SRA Author Index
Main Abstracts Menu Page
RiskWorld Home Page