New market-based system aims to predict bird flu

WASHINGTON, Mar 1 (Reuters) Is a bird flu pandemic coming? Health experts say there is no way to know, and especially no way to know when.

But someone does know, or, rather, the combined experience of a lot of someones -- doctors and nurses treating the odd human patient, microbiologists studying virus samples and virus experts studying disease patterns.

A new ''market'' launched today aims to take advantage of this combined knowledge to predict any actual pandemic.

''We have been doing this on a very local level in Iowa to predict seasonal influenza,'' said Dr. Phil Polgreen, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Iowa and director of the Infectious Disease Society of America's Emerging Infections Network.

The Iowa Health Prediction Market, seen online at http://fluprediction.uiowa.edu, will use a 245,000 dollars grant from the nonprofit Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to create the Avian Flu Market.

To do this, the team is using the nonprofit Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases, or ProMED, an online global reporting system run by the International Society for Infectious Diseases.

ProMED, founded by Dr Lawrence Madoff of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, uses the Internet and e-mail to track disease outbreaks.

''Larry has a group of about 40,000 people from around the world that all receive e-mails about events related to emerging infectious diseases,'' Polgreen said in a telephone interview.

''They all have access to what is going on. Their fingers are on the pulse of the infectious disease world.'' The H5N1 avian influenza virus now mostly infects birds, but WHO considers it is likely to mutate into a form that can infect people more easily. It has infected 275 people since 2003 and killed 167 of them.

BEATING THE BUREAUCRATS WHO and other health agencies are watching closely to see if more people become infected, but reporting and testing can be slow. A lab technician working in an affected country, like Indonesia, might notice something before the global bureaucracy does.

A market attuned to quick trading on information might pick up that little tick more quickly.

In such a prediction market, people make investments in events they think are likely. They are given some seed money to start with and use it to invest in various outcomes.

''We are going to start with 11 questions that all relate to events that, if they occur, raise the likelihood of a pandemic from this strain of virus,'' Polgreen said.

''You buy either 'yes or 'no.' If you think it is going to happen, you buy a lot of yeses. So the price of 'yes' will go up and the price for 'no' would go down.'' One of the questions: ''Will Phase Five of the WHO-defined Pandemic Alert Period be announced before July 1, 2007?'' The World Health Organization currently has the world at Phase 3 of a pandemic -- there is a new virus that affects and kills people, but it does not yet easily spread from one person to another.

Phase 5 would mean it was spreading easily from person to person, but not over a widespread area. Phase Six is a pandemic, with the new disease spreading globally.

''Many health care workers are the first to know about influenza activity in their communities and that information can help predict the course of an infectious disease,'' said Forrest Nelson, an economics professor at the University of Iowa who invented the first such market, to predict the outcome of US elections. It has outperformed many opinion polls.

REUTERS PB RK1055