Scenario 2 - Vaccines
You are the CEO of Advanced ImmunoTox, Inc. a high performance immunization/vaccine production corporation that contracts with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to produce over 50% of the worlds annual flu vaccine. WHO and CDC contact you warning that an additional flu strain, Avian flu (WHO), may break out. If it does, the potential for a major pandemic could occur.

Given the potential need for the simultaneous production of vaccines for both the flu and the avian flu, it is clear that if such a pandemic occurs ImmunoTox could not produce enough of both vaccines to meet its 50% supply line. As CEO, you need to optimize your information to make a decision about the likelihood of such an outbreak against the annual flu virus spread and the demand for that vaccine. You call on your Epidemiology, Bioinformatics, and Mathematical Modeling Departments to develop a computational model of the spread of both viruses so that you can experiment with potential outcomes.

What do you do? What things are important to include in such a model? What things do you think you need to know to develop an effective mathematical/computer model that could be used to study the spread of the two viruses? How would you test such a model (prediction vs. reality)?

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