I'm sure everyone here has heard about H5N1 aka Avian Flu. I didn't see the movie a few weeks back, but I've been tracking the progress of H5N1 for about a year now. Let me sum it up like this: the potential for loss of life from a mutated strain of H5N1 is orders of magnitude larger than anything that any terrorists could pull off. Many of the researchers in the field believe we're only a couple of mutations away from an efficient H2H H5N1 - and given the billions of hosts (mostly birds, but also other species like pigs) there is plenty of opportunity for those mutations to occur.
OK, so for the last year or so that I've followed this there have been some hints of H2H (human to human) transmission of H5N1. But so far it appears that in most of those cases the transmission hasn't been very efficient. Now things appear to possibly be changing in Indonesia where there is a family cluster with something like 8 people in a family infected and six dead. H2H is strongly suspected. Not good. So what's this got to do with anything we talk about here? Here's what I'm thinking... What if we created a website where medical/Biology biology folks could post requests for help from programmers? There's lots of data to sift through as the WHO is getting new virus sequences on a daily basis. There is an open repository of these genetic sequences - a lot of the data (not all) is readily available. You can imagine that there are all kinds of computing tools that could be developed to help researchers learn more about the virus as well as perhaps develop compounds that would fight it - datamining, search algorithms, bioinformatics, etc. So basically, I'm proposing we develop a site matchmaking site like this. Seems like potentially a good job for Rails. I think if we publicised this site on various sites like digg and reddit that there would be plenty of programming talent available to volunteer for projects - the problems are very interesting and the goals are very worthwhile. Imagine the draw of participating in a project that could potentially avert a pandemic - that sounds like the ultimate open source project. The harder part would be getting the word out to the Biology folks. I've been posting comments about a system like this on Effect Measure (a website dedicated to public health issues including H5N1). Thoughts? Phil _______________________________________________ PDXRuby mailing list [email protected] IRC: #pdx.rb on irc.freenode.net http://lists.pdxruby.org/mailman/listinfo/pdxruby
