How Computers Could Reduce the Spread of HIV

Scientific American – Fri, Jul 27, 2012 Visualization of computer model showing HIV risk behaviors; red dots are injection drug users that engage in needle sharing or unprotected sex; courtesy of Brandon Marshall/Brown University

Condom use, earlier treatment and increased education have gone a long way to reducing HIV spread in the U.S. Nonetheless, some 4,000 inhabitants of New York City still became infected with HIV in 2009.

Injection drug users make up a small portion of the new infections (just over 4 percent in NYC, and about 9 percent nationally), but they represent a finite and targetable population that can benefit from low-cost and well-vetted programs, such as needle exchanges.

Establishing even better needle exchange programs or more widespread substance-abuse treatment opportunities might help to limit these new infections among drug users. But finding out how effective these prevention programs truly are with scientifically controlled studies can take years and lots of money. If only researchers could run computer simulations to come up with some answers, as they do to model other complex systems

Now they might just be able to, with the help of a high-power, automated version of what you could call Sims for the urban class. The goal of the computer model, conceived of in part by Brandon Marshall, an epidemiologist at Brown University, is to

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