Epidemic Outbreak Surveillance (EOS)

As a result of the terrorist actions of 11 September 2001, the U.S. Government accelerated plans to design medical surveillance systems to minimize and mitigate potential bio-terrorist attacks.

Military medicine and infectious disease surveillance in the field requires a real world test bed that can detect and identify pathogens that may be agents of infectious disease outbreaks resulting from natural causes or induced causes, e.g. acts of bio-terrorism.   Clinical laboratory diagnostic orders are limited by time and cost constraints to selectively confirm or discriminate from among a few pathogens suggested in a physician's examination of the patient.  Reportable disease communications among local, regional, state and national public health agencies is slow and inefficient.  In contrast, the Epidemic Outbreak Surveillance (EOS) program is designed to achieve the following:

  • Provide definitive results that meet or exceed the quality of results from a centralized clinical diagnostics laboratory;
  • Provide results in near real-time, not over several days that are often required for a clinical laboratory report;
  • Support simultaneous, multiplexed analyses representing a broad palette of routinely encountered and exotic pathogens, their diverse and natural strain variants, and their various genomic near-neighbor species; and
  • To be leveraged as a system, through multi-directional communications and across a distributed network.

EOS also intends to provide answers to important questions regarding the meaning of pathogen identity and distribution in terms of ____

·      The transmission of pathogens among groups of susceptible and resistant
        individuals;

·      The true background prevalence of particular pathogens in ambient
        environments;

·      The probabilistic and deterministic relationships of exposure to and infection by
        particular pathogens;

·      Which medical and public health measures would best contain and control an
        epidemic outbreak.

A controlled population and monitored environment is required for any experimental test approach to resolve sets of fundamentally unanswered questions of infectious disease process and epidemiology. The project is designed to implement an Epidemic Outbreak Surveillance (EOS) model that will:

  • Focus on a controlled military population that has historically been troubled by naturally occurring outbreaks of an epidemic respiratory disease;
  • Deploy ADP technologies for pathogen detection and identification;
  • Link ADP outputs with databases of clinical findings of tested individuals; and
  • Provide infrastructure for bioinformatics analysis and data mining.

The ultimate aim is to integrate components that will be used to synthesize data that  indicate the relative likelihood of specific pathogen diagnoses and to route this information to decision makers.