Epidemic, bioterrorism study in Las Vegas

are also seeking resorts’ participation. They would like to know which hospitals the resorts send hotel guests to when they get sick and the nature of those illnesses. This could help determine whether a particular hotel was the source of the outbreak or whether the viral disease emanated from somewhere else.

Resorts are hesitant, to say the least, because they don’t want the reputation of playing loose with their guests’ privacy and don’t want to be identified as the site of infection.

Cochran is optimistic that they will come around, though. “We’re sensitive to the confidentiality issue,” he says. “We also know that the information has to be provided in a way where it can benefit the hotels in terms of not only keeping their visitors safe but their workers, too. It would be good for the hotels to participate because the quicker they know something is going on, the faster they can make corrections.”

Researchers are also trying to compile what is known as social modeling data to estimate the number of people a typical tourist comes in contact with while in town — in an elevator, at a card table, walking the Strip, at a show, in a bar.

Likewise, Cochran and his QinetiQ teammates would like to collect passenger information from airlines to give researchers the ability to tell whether an outbreak could be linked to a particular flight. The whole point is to trace the path of the virus.

“Tourism professionals in Las Vegas already invest significant resources to ensure the health and safety of our visitors,” CerJanic says. “Both UNLV and QinetiQ North America expect to leverage the results of this project to benefit the vital industry of Las Vegas to better protect their guests and workers.”

UMC shares certain early-warning information on contagious diseases with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through the CDC’s BioSense program, a national health surveillance network. This network identifies the existence of outbreaks in specific communities but not the source of the virus or the paths it took to reach a particular city, as Cochran is seeking to accomplish.

“There are some problems with BioSense in terms of how well it really drills into the information that it has,” he says. “What we want to be able to do is to drill further into the data so we can find where the people came from. The more information we can gather on tourists the better.”