Carrie Manore, left, and Morgan Gorris helped develop EpiEarth, a platform that predicts where vector-borne diseases will emerge by modeling climate, land use, and mosquito and tick populations. Photo: LANL
As climate change pushes disease-carrying mosquitoes and ticks into new territories, public health officials face a challenge: how do you prepare for outbreaks in places that have never seen them?
Los Alamos National Laboratory developed the EpiEarth platform, which earned a Gold Medal Special Recognition Award for Corporate Social Responsibility.
“Most models before this focused on one location, one pathogen,” said Carrie Manore, the LANL scientist who led the project. “We saw this need to say what’s happening at a continental, at a regional scale, not just in this one city here and there that has a separate model.”
EpiEarth combines weather data, land use, human population, and vector biology to predict where diseases such as West Nile virus, dengue, and Lyme disease are likely to emerge. The platform’s modular design allows researchers to swap in different pathogens and data sources.
A key feature is the ability to run intervention scenarios. “If it’s purely statistical, it’s hard to run ‘what if I spray all the mosquitoes? What if we come up with some amazing vaccine?'” Manore said. “So we have an underlying model that can adapt to different scenarios as we try to plan for decision making.”
The platform has been validated in multiple locations. “We’ve done case studies in Toronto with West Nile virus that have predicted really accurately what’s going to happen,” Manore said. “We’re working with the San Diego Department of Health for their mosquitoes and dengue. And we’ve also worked on predicting and validating in Brazil for dengue virus.”
Looking ahead, the team is expanding into tick-borne diseases and agricultural biosecurity. “People are really interested in tick-borne, like Lyme disease—that’s a big problem, and we know that the ranges are changing and expanding,” Manore said. “We’re also working with folks on the agriculture side, particularly from a biosecurity perspective.”
