The Statistical Landscape of Infectious Disease: Past, Present, and Future

• Activity Number: 269
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2014 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Biopharmaceutical Section
• Author(s): Martha Nason*+
• Companies: NIAID/NIH
• Keywords: infectious disease ; biostatistics ; immunology

Abstract

Infectious Diseases present unique challenges to researchers. As in other disease areas, the human heterogeneity has a vast impact on the search for answers-including genetics, behavioral, and environmental factors. However, this heterogeneity is overlaid by several other important dimensions. For every scientific question that is asked about human diversity and responses to infecting organisms, a parallel set of questions exist about the organism diversity, and adaptation to human immune defenses. The probability of establishing an infection or of transmission to someone else will be functions of human, host, and environmental factors and may further depend on ideas like social networks in order to describe the probabilities of exposure. As technology evolves, new questions arise about each of the human and the infectious organism, as well as the interaction between the two. This talk will discuss some of the important statistical contributions in infectious disease over the past century, as well as current areas of active work and potentially future directions.