Another advantage is that some medical topics (e.g., antibiotic resistance, evolution of the flu virus) are exemplars of rapid evolution, in which the changes occur within a human timescale of years or even months and therefore are easier for people to grasp readily.
The main ingredients are (A) a socio-demographic model (kept fixed in all the considered models), in which individuals are co-located in households, schools and workplaces on the basis of census and commuting data and (B) a transmission model describing the temporal evolution of the flu epidemic in the considered study area (Italy).
To date most attempts to predict the evolution of seasonal flu viruses have focused on identifying specific features within the genetic sequences that might indicate fitness.
These comparisons lead to the conclusion that FLU describes the evolution of influenza viruses better than other models, thus resulting in more accurate phylogenetic trees.
We propose here our FLU model which was specifically estimated for modeling the evolution of influenza viruses.
For analysis of the evolution of influenza, genomes were taken from the Influenza Virus Resource at NCBI, (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/FLU/FLU.html).nih.gov/genomes/FLU/FLU.html
For instance, we cannot rely upon ruminations about the fossil record to lead us to a prediction of the evolution of the ambient flu virus so that we can prepare the vaccine today for next year's more virulent strain.
Reassortments are events in the evolution of the genome of influenza (flu), whereby segments of the genome are exchanged between different strains.
Doctors normally expect the vaccine to work in half of those who receive it, but evolution of the H3N2 strain of flu meant the number protected fell to just three in every 100 people.
While these antigenic spaces or maps have been used to visualize the trajectories of flu's antigenic evolution (Smith et al., 2004; de Jong et al., 2007), models that start with the assumption of these maps considerably inflate the degree of competition between antigenic variants.
