Jason Matheny at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory sent me a list of more computer models for public health emergency preparedness planning. I will posting my comments on these in future posts here.
First up is SimPox from a research team at the Department of Medical Biometry, University of Tübingen. SimPox runs as a Java applet. It simulates the spread of smallpox in a population. The user can change parameters about the disease (including its infectivity and latent period), the population (the initial fraction immune), and the intervention measures (such as surveillance and vaccination) and see charts with the predicted number of people affected each day of the smallpox attack. This includes the number of roaming cases, the number of cases detected, and the number isolated. If multiple simulations runs are used, then the results for each day can be are shown as a standard error around the mean, the minimum and maximum (over the simulation runs), and the individual simulation results (trajectories). The program also provides a text report with all of the parameter settings and numerical results, which one could copy and paste to save or print.
