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Even though you know it’s a sensible idea, you’re on the fence about whether it would be worth the bother to have this season’s influenza vaccine. But a quick glance at the flu forecast on your phone sets you straight: there’s a warning about a recent spike of cases nearby, so you head to the clinic rather than risk a feverish week in bed. Epidemiologists eagerly anticipate such a future, in which they can track infectious diseases with the same confidence as meteorologists mapping the weather. But those making predictions of this type face a serious problem. “There is just not a lot of observational data in the disease world,” says Cécile Viboud, an epidemiologist at the US National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center in Bethesda, Maryland. “It’s several orders of magnitude less than what we have in other fields.”
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Nature555, S2-S4 (2018)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-02473-5
This article is part of Nature Outlook: The future of medicine, an editorially independent supplement produced with the financial support of third parties. About this content.