Content about “

epidemiology

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What is herd immunity and what does it have to do with a number called R₀?

An urgent call has gone out to the scientific modelling community to help fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Two Cambridge mathematicians are helping to lead the charge.

How do mathematical models of COVID-19 work and should we believe them? We talk to an epidemiologist, who has been working flat out to inform the government, to find out more.

Cambridge researchers, the BBC, and thousands of citizen scientists have created a revolutionary infectious disease data set.

Take part in an exciting new project and help fight future pandemics!

Why maths is an important tool in the fight against Ebola.

When NASA first decided to put a man on the Moon they had a problem: once the Apollo spacecraft was in flight, they would not be able to observe its exact location and neither would they be able to predict it using physics. How could they send astronauts to the Moon if they didn't know where they were? An ingenious mathematician came up with an answer.

How do you judge the risks and benefits of new medical treatments, or of lifestyle choices? With a finite health care budget, how do you decide which treatments should be made freely available on the NHS? Historically, decisions like these have been made on the basis of doctors' individual experiences with how these treatments perform, but over recent decades the approach to answering these questions has become increasingly rational.

Infectious diseases hardly ever disappear from the headlines — swine flu is only the last in a long list containing SARS, bird flu, HIV, and childhood diseases like mumps, measles and rubella. If it's not the disease itself that hits the news, then it's the vaccines with their potential side effects. It can be hard to tell the difference between scare mongering and responsible reporting, because media coverage rarely provides a look behind the scenes. So how do scientists reach the conclusions they do?

We have all become more aware of the dangers of influenza this year, but why is it so dangerous? Julia Gog explains that the unusual structure of the influenza genome can lead to dangerous evolutionary jumps, and how mathematics is helping to understand how the virus replicates.