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 Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), a leading research institution
affiliated with the Brazilian Ministry of Health, plans to use IBM's
technology to analyze information from official data about human
travel patterns to anecdotal observations recorded on social media.
Global health officials are racing to better understand the Zika
virus, which has caused a major outbreak that began in Brazil last
year and has spread to many countries in the Americas.
IBM also said it plans to donate a one-year subscription feed of
highly local, daily rainfall, average temperature and relative
humidity data to the U.S. Fund for United Nations Children's
Emergency Fund (UNICEF).
Rainfall, temperature and humidity play key roles in the development
of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which carries Zika as well as dengue,
chikungunya and Yellow Fever.
IBM is also collaborating with the New York-based Cary Institute of
Ecosystem Studies to collect and mine biological and ecological data
to help devise algorithms that can determine which primates are
carriers for the virus.
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IBM also runs the 'OpenZika project' on the company's World
Community Grid, a crowd-sourced supercomputer.
The initiative allows scientists in the United States and Brazil to
screen millions of chemical compounds to identify candidates to
combat the virus.
More than a dozen small biotech firms and other organizations are
developing vaccines against Zika, which is linked to birth defects
and neurological disorders, although most work is at a nascent
stage.
Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc, said in March it was working with
UNICEF to analyze data in an effort to map and anticipate the spread
of the virus.
(Reporting by Natalie Grover in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj
Kalluvila)
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