Collegiate Times

Thanks to the work of both Stephen Eubank, deputy director of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory at the Virginia Tech Bioinformatics Institute, and Bryan Lewis, a NDSSL graduate student, there is currently a museum exhibit in Washington, D.C. that aims to teach the public about the importance of vaccinations.

“Stephen Eubank and Bryan Lewis were invited to contribute to a visualization display that specifically focuses on the modeling and simulation of infectious diseases, in this case influenza and measles,” said Barry Whyte, Strategic and Research Communications Officer at VBI. “Part of the mandate of the Marian Koshland Science Museum is to engage the general public in current scientific issues that may directly impact their lives. For this purpose, the museum, which is part of the National Academies of Science, uses state-of-the-art exhibits to reach as wide an audience as possible.”

The exhibit is entitled “Infectious Disease; Evolving Challenges to Human Health” and is located at the Marian Koshland Museum of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It was really an honor that the National Academy of Sciences asked us to get involved,” Lewis said, “I was very glad to see our work go on to Washington.” 

The exhibit is a special on infectious diseases, and Eubank and Lewis’ work focuses on measles and influenza.

“The disease topics were assigned to us by the board,” Eubank said. “I suspect because there has been an increase in the last few years of people refusing the measles vaccine and also an increase in people failing to get a flu vaccination because they are failing to take the CDC guidelines seriously.”

Eubank and Lewis simulated the effects of seasonal measles and influenza in Chicago to illustrate how these diseases would spread in an

American urban area. They simulated a population in which hypothetical people were infected with measles or influenza and then evaluated how quickly the disease would spread based on personal contact.

“We pretty much gave an unfortunate number of people one of the diseases,” Lewis said. “There were about four or five infected folks pushed into the population each day, and then we observed how it spread based on contact with others.”

The experiment then illustrated how these diseases were spread when some of the population had been vaccinated and compared it to how diseases spread when some of the population had not been properly vaccinated.

“The reason people are not getting their vaccines is because they do not see measles or influenza to be a serious problem anymore,” Lewis said. “But vaccines are the reason that measles and influenza are no longer viewed as serious problems. If you reduce even a small number of the population who do not get vaccinated it could result in an outbreak in 10 to 20 years.”

If there is an outbreak in 10 to 20 years this could be a serious problem because manufacturing companies do not make many vaccines as it is, so if an outbreak were to occur it could potentially result in quite a few deaths.

“If people took the CDC guidelines seriously it might give manufacturers an additional incentive to ramp up vaccinations,” Eubank said. “Flu manufacturers, for example, have figured out that if they make a lot of a vaccine they lose money, however if there is ever a pandemic that means we’re out.”

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects about this work is the fact that it is in a central location to impact policy makers and the decisions that they make.

“I think this is extra-powerful work,” Lewis said. “If Congress was to stop in and see the exhibit it would give viability to the work; this is especially important because they are the people who make decisions that become law.”

The researchers of the project maintain that the main goal of their work was to engage the public in this issue. They believe that vaccinations should be taken seriously because, as their experiment clearly illustrate, if people stop getting these vaccines the results could be detrimental.

“We are very glad to see this exhibit out,” Lewis said. “Some numbers may be interesting academically but you really want to illustrate this information from a public health perspective, so that the public understands the importance of vaccinations.”