The
widespread fear that various pandemics are set to devastate the human race has
led to another kind of outbreak: a rash of models predicting how various
diseases will spread through society. These models are valuable. They allow governments
to estimate how badly their society will be influenced and to make emergency
plans accordingly. Now students at Marshall University and Howard Weiss at
Georgia Tech examine the effectiveness of another tool: the media. To test
their hypothesis, they simulated the effect of an outbreak of Ebola fever in
the West Virginia town of Huntington which has a population of 50,000. They
used a standard model which counts the number of susceptible and infected
individuals and the number of “removed” individuals, those that either die or
recover and become immune, and models the rate at which people jump from one
pool to another. They also add one additional assumption to this model: that
the number of individuals who self-isolate increases with the number of
infections reported by the media. So the idea is that public health agencies
constantly update the media about the number of infections, which then
immediately pass on the information to the general population. When that
happens, the result is a dramatic decrease in the severity of the outbreak. The
more up-to-date the information, the greater this effect.