NIH Grants Support for Avian Influenza Research

Tom Smith and CTR were awarded a one-year $100,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to examine the “Comparative Spillover Dynamics of Avian Influenza in Endemic Countries.” Other partners on the grant include the EcoHealth Alliance, Stanford University and the University of Oklahoma. This award continues research support for the partnership on this topic provided for the past three years by the Fogarty International Center of NIH. The partners will collect and analyze data on wild waterfowl migration, poultry farm size, market dynamics and human contact networks with these sources of infection. CTR will collaborate with the other partners to combine the perspectives of spatial, network, and dynamical epidemiological models in a GIS-based database system to predict the spatial variation of influenza A transmission and risk of spillover.