Outbreak Detectives Embrace the Genome Era: Science

“Genomic epidemiologists say, it’s time to use the technique to track microbial movements on a global scale. By routinely sequencing bacterial samples—perhaps up to a billion a year—scientists could pinpoint the sources of new outbreaks faster, determine whether a bug is resistant to antibiotics, and investigate how public policies or the use of certain drugs change the course of microbial evolution.”

One part of my job is talking to “pharmaco”epidemiologist who take claims data and electronic health records and mine them for outcomes and drug safety and effectiveness. [Plug] Our product can take huge amounts of data and query it at blazingly fast speeds.

For sure, if we have some large pathogen vigilance data stream being added to a large data warehouse (ours), researchers can query and analyze the data and predict outbreaks before they happen.

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