Flu 101

The enormous risks of pandemic flu were, five years ago, known to only a few -- often dedicated historians and medical specialists. Today, after SARS and with the novel H1N1 "swine flu" sweeping the world and the much more lethal avian flu virus H5N1 threatening the world, awareness of pandemic flu has increased exponentially. Intense efforts aimed at averting an international calamity are now found in many countries worldwide.

MIT’s Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals (CESF) is not focused on medical research. While CESF is hopeful of breakthroughs that could produce a vaccine quickly and inexpensively, current best practice suggests that approval of an effective vaccine will take at least six months after the offending virus (perhaps H5N1, but perhaps a different variant) mutates to become human-to-human efficiently transmittable. Within six months, the entire world could be engulfed with pandemic flu. Even after six months, finite production capacities coupled with cost considerations would limit vaccine production so that only a miniscule fraction of the planet's 6 billion inhabitants would have access to it. So, in essence, we are naked against a new virulent flu virus, naked for at least six months and perhaps much longer. The new H1N1 vaccine was created in perhaps record time, but still near the six-month mark.

What are the alternatives, collectively and individually? There are actions, controls and behavioral modifications that can be put in place that can reduce the prevalence of influenza infection: decision alternatives -- from individuals, to families, to work places and employers, to governments at all levels -- to control and reduce the prevalence of a virulent flu, once it is introduced into the population.

Current focus is non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) -- including social distancing (frequency of human contacts) and hygienic behavioral changes (frequent hand-washing, coughing into one’s sleeve) -- that can reduce the transmission rate and severity of infectious diseases such as pandemic influenza in the community.

CESF is one integrated flu research team, supported currently under two grants: one from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in partnership with the Harvard School of Public Health, and the other from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

CESF is a multi-disciplinary team and operations researchers who have applied mathematical modeling successfully to a wide variety of both public and private service systems; physicians who have focused on policy and processes for implementing change. CESF is guided by a panel of experts with wide expertise, including those who have previously studied pandemic influenza, those who have created private sector business plans for coping with the disease, and historians. This effort will be housed at CESF, a research arm of MIT’s Engineering Systems Division (ESD). Specialists are in the new domain of “engineering systems,” an emerging field of study of complex systems where the effort operates at the juncture of engineering, management and the social sciences.