This is the first update in quite some time. One reason is that the Malaria modeling project has over the last couple of months transitioned into a new project phase. We have received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for two more years. Here�s a short overview of what this new project phase will focus on:

-New models for natural immunity
-Simulating the dynamics of antimalarial drug resistance in complex clinical settings
-Simulating situations where people vary a lot in their exposure patterns
-Simulating malaria in situations where it is close to being eliminated
-Finally, there is a recognized need to make the simulation models more accessible to the intended target audience: Policy makers and planners of malaria control interventions. For this we have started to collaborate with the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory (NDSSL) at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (Virginia Tech). The goal is to develop a job submission system to give qualified users an opportunity to use model predictions in their decision making process.

Another reason for malariacontrol.net being less active is that we focused on application development in the last few months. As mentioned before, we are getting closer to the point where we can release the new C++ implementation of the simulation model as our main application. We are now hosting the source code of the science application on Google code: Feel free to have a look at this, we welcome feedback from your side. At this point the best way to contact us is by sending me a PM. We anticipate that the new implementation will be ready by the end of June.

We also have some new members on our project team here at the Swiss Tropical Institute. Diggory Hardy has recently joined our team. He is a software engineer and will be mainly working on the further development of the science application.

The analysis of the results from simulation study that we ran late last year has shown that there is a need to run additional scenarios of the same type. We have created and uploaded the first of these batches of workunits to run with the stable version of the science application (the Fortran version). We anticipate that it will take a couple of weeks to go through all the workunits.

Thank you for your patience and continued support!

On behalf of the modeling team,
Nick
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Nicolas Maire
Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute
http://www.swisstph.ch