DIMACS Workshop on The Evolution and Control of Drug Resistance
Cancelled
DIMACS Center, CoRE Building, Rutgers University
- Organizers:
- Sally Blower, UCLA Medical School, sblower@mednet.ucla.edu
- Tom Lietman, UCSF Medical School, tml@itsa.ucsf.edu
Presented under the auspices of the
Special Focus on Computational and Mathematical Epidemiology.
One only has to review an issue of a medical journal or a popular
magazine to realize that drug resistance has become a major concern to
physicians, patients, and public health care workers. Recently
infectious disease modelers have begun to develop models for
predicting the evolution of drug resistance and for designing
strategies to control drug resistance. So far most of this theoretical
work has had a limited impact on the way physicians treat patients and
the design of public health (population-level) control
strategies. This workshop will bring together experts in "the
real-world" of infectious disease and theoreticians to discuss how
models can be designed and analyzed so that theoretical work can have
a significant impact on informing the medical and public health
decision-making process. Addressing the problems of drug resistance is
an area where population biologists, mathematicians, statisticians,
geneticists, public health care workers all have different
perspectives and research interests, as well as different terminology,
research interests and goals. We will explore how both transmission,
genetic and statistical models can help predict future levels of drug
resistance and be used to design effective control strategies. We will
use a hierarchical approach to discuss the problems of drug
resistance, beginning with models that focus on the emergence of
resistance within an individual host, then moving to models of
hospital-acquired resistance, and thence to models of
community-acquired resistance. We will discuss how these models can be
tested by data in a rigorous manner in terms of both the assumptions
upon which they are based and the predictions that they make. We will
cover a wide variety of different pathogens, including the major
killers, HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria. In addition, we will discuss
a body of theoretical work on the related problems of the development
and control of insecticidal and fungicidal resistance; we will invite
participants who work in these areas and discuss what infectious
disease modelers can learn from these related fields.
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Document last modified on February 13, 2002.