From this Mercury News article, the world is facing new breed of infectious diseases. SARS, West Nile, Ebola and AIDS are all emerged within the past 30 years. This is no accident. Scientists have pointed this to human activities and the alteration of ecology.

Among the factors are microbial adaptation and change; human susceptibility to infection; climate and weather; changing ecosystems; human demographics and behavior; economic development and land use; international travel and commerce; technology and industry; breakdown of public health measures; poverty and social inequality; war and famine; lack of political will; and bioterrorism.

Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of CDC, said, "The kinds of things we are doing for SARS, we can anticipate we are going to do again and again."

2003.05.13 [health] - comments (0)

My server is now using its idle time to help search for a cure for SARS. The infectious diseases has already causes hundreds of deaths.

This project is hosted by the Rothberg Institute. The software can be downloaded from D2OL. The program is using models to test the effectiveness of potential drugs to fight the SARS virus. Scientists like to screen millions of drug compounds. This would requires even a supercomputer a long long time to accomplish. Instead, similar to the SETI@home project, they are calling for volunteers around the world to use their computer's idle time to solve a part of the problem. Tens of thousands have already signed up by running the software on their computer, forming a global distributed computing system to attack this problem.

We may not find a magic cure easily. Still I hope we can pool the resource for a worthy cause.

A candidate molecule

2003.05.03 [tech, health] - comments (0)