Modelling the Ebola Outbreak using Wolfram


The recent outbreak of the Ebola virus disease (EVD) has shown how quickly diseases can spread in human populations. This threat is, of course, not limited to EVD; there are many pathogens, such as various types of influenza (H5N1, H7N9, etc.) with the potential to cause a pandemic. Therefore, mathematical modeling of the transmission pathways becomes ever more important. Health officials need to make decisions as to how to counter the threat. There are a large number of scientific publications on the subject, such as the recent Science publication by Dirk Brockmann, which is available here. Professor Brockmann also produced videos to illustrate the research, which can be found on YouTube (video1, video2, video3). It would be interesting to reproduce some of the results from that paper and generally explore the subject with Mathematica.


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