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Sharing Scarce Flu Vaccine May Be Best: Game Theory Model Shows Hoarding Supplies Isn’t Healthiest Choice
As manufacturers race to test and deliver an H1N1 influenza vaccine by October, public health officials are working equally feverishly to determine how scarce doses should be allocated.
Because supplies are expected to be short, governments may be tempted to buy large quantities of vaccine and antiviral treatments to protect their citizens. Yet research from Duke University’s Fuqua school of Business and the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT) indicates that in the case of some epidemics, countries would be best served by giving their drug supplies to another country.
Duke Professor Peng Sun, Duke PhD student Liu Yang, and Professor Francis deVericourt of ESMT created a model based on game theory to test how countries with adequate drug supplies should react to an epidemic affecting a neighboring country with little or no supply of vaccine or treatments. Read the rest of this entry »
Researchers show brain waves can ‘write’ on a computer in early tests
Brain waves can be used to type alphanumerical characters on a computer screen. This has been demonstrated by Neuroscientists at the Mayo Clinic campus in Jacksonville, Fla and presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Epilepsy Society.
In this study, the two patients with epilepsy were already being monitored for seizure activity using electrocorticography (ECoG), in which electrodes are placed directly on the surface of the brain to record electrical activity produced by the firing of nerve cells, sat in front of a monitor that was hooked to a computer running the researchers’ software, which was designed to interpret electrical signals coming from the electrodes. The patients were asked to look at the screen, which contained a 6-by-6 matrix with a single alphanumeric character inside each square. Read the rest of this entry »