Thanks to Dr. Pardis Sabeti for tweeting the link to ebola: data release. This is very much for the grownups, but I look forward to some of them explaining to us kids what it all means. Excerpt:
Since March of 2014, the world has witnessed the largest outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) in history, which only now shows signs of receding. According to the latest updates from the World Health Organization, more than 20,000 cases and over 8,000 deaths have been reported, with most of them having taken place in the West African nations of Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia.
Open access to genetic and clinical data is crucial to understand how Ebola spreads among the human population, to characterize the symptoms predicting mortality, and hopefully to develop an effective vaccine and better patient treatment and care. These goals can only be achieved through active collaboration between governments, scientists, doctors, humanitarian organizations, and the general public.
The Sabeti Lab at Harvard University and the Broad Institute publicly released the viral sequences for the first 78 Ebola patients in Sierra Leone back in July. Since then, the group led by Robert Garry at Tulane University obtained complementary demographic and clinical metadata for many of those initial patients. Scientists at the Sabeti and Garry labs worked together in the analysis of that data, and the first results from the analysis were reported in the scientific literature.
Here we are releasing the metadata with the hope that interested individuals from all over the world can examine it further and find other associations and trends that might have escaped our analysis and could help in the understanding of the disease.
Update: This Washington Post report provides some background.
