New app launched to monitor spread of infectious diseases

Dr Hannah Fry (UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis) is involved in a new project which aims to better understand how pandemics, such as flu, can spread across the country. Researchers will collect data about how people travel and interact via a mobile app. The app, launched today and commissioned by BBC, is called BBC Pandemic and researchers hope it will play a key part in predicting how a flu pandemic might spread across the country and also help determine what can be done to stop it. The project needs members of the public to download the app to take part in the experiment. Dr Fry explains, "If you want to know how a pandemic spreads, there are two things that are really important. You need to know how often people come into contact with each other and how far they travel. And if you have that, you can create a mathematical simulation of what a pandemic would look like, and use that to ask questions." Although flu outbreaks are common, in the last 100 years there have been four pandemics of deadlier types of flu, including the Spanish Influenza, which killed up to 100 million people worldwide.