Looks like the Swine Flu or also known as H1N1 Internet buzz on Facebook and Twitter is over despite the fact that the number of confirmed cases worldwide are increasing rapidly each day. With the vaccine coming in September this year, we need not to worry much about the flu pandemic anymore. According to the 10TV News, researchers at Ohio State University has created a supercomputer installed with a powerful software which helps to track the spread of the H1N1 virus worldwide.
Developed by a team of researchers at the Ohio State University Medical Center, the supercomputer make use of the free and popular Google Earth to keep updated to the latest trends of the influenza virus. This mapping software is able to help them to predict where will be the next hotspots, thus informing the local government in advance to slowing down a further spread of the outbreak. All thanks to Ohio’s Supercomputer Center, hidden at a secure location, observing the trends will much easier as running this custom software requires lots of space.
With the supercomputer, the researchers are able to crunch data on how the virus has mutated in order to track its movement throughout the world, and from species to species. Besides that, it can also tracks when strains of the virus become drug-resistant.
In the past generations, people then were not able to control the spread of the outbreak because they can’t determine where it will show up next. One good example would be the Spanish Flu in 1918 which had killed over 50 million people around the world. Today, as technology moves at a really fast rate, we are fortunate that these supercomputers and softwares are able to detect the next hotspot and hence saving our precious lives too.