The Disease Detectives

By Stefanie Friedhoff/Ann Arbor

PLANNING FOR THE PANDEMIC

Sandro Galea is not your typical epidemiologist. Instead of studying microbes, he studies minds--human minds and how they might respond to an outbreak of SARS or Ebola or avian flu. "Once a virus hits the ground, there isn't time to contemplate how the public might react," says Galea. "We need to better understand why people react the way they do and how we can positively influence their behavior." The public psychology of emerging diseases is a new field of research, and Galea, 34, is one of its pioneers. A professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health, he was studying the psychosocial effects of 9/11 on New Yorkers when he was tapped to look at how Canadians were responding to the 2003 SARS outbreak and quarantines in Toronto.

The first thing he learned was that people tend to react irrationally--rushing to the hospital before they have symptoms, for example, or staying home even when they are desperately ill. "The problem is that the more irrational the public's reactions to an outbreak, the harder it becomes to control and contain the disease," says Galea. Also, the harder the economy is hit: the Congressional Budget Office recently put the potential costs of a flu pandemic in the U.S. at $675 billion--half of it caused by fear and confusion.