A team of scientists unveiled a playbook Wednesday in the fight against infectious disease outbreaks: genetic mapping by computers to find bugs that slip past other medical tests.

The process, experts say, should facilitate much faster responses to deadly outbreaks.

“There is no doubt that this technology is going to play a major role in our defenses,” says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The coordinated global response, he says, showed “the way it should work” when a new killer bug emerges.

Fauci and other experts are particularly concerned about the threat of a pandemic as cases of bird flu mount around the world.

“This is new technology that has spectacular power,” he says. “It’s extraordinary in its capability, and it was manifested in a very dramatic case.” Details are to be published next month in the New England Journal of Medicine, but were posted online early so scientists can see how one international team found a culprit.

Faced with a mysterious cluster of three deaths in Australia in April, scientists there looked for viruses and bacteria that might have infected the women, ages 44 to 64, who had received transplanted organs from the same donor.

After several weeks of work, they came up empty because the virus was new and invisible to tests.

They then sought help from infectious disease experts in the USA, who turned to the computerized genetic-sequencing tools that have mapped the human genome, a map of the body’s DNA.

The team, which included experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, academic researchers from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York, and a Connecticut company called 454 Life Sciences, eventually found one molecule of evidence inside a cell that most likely came from rodent urine in Yugoslavia.

How they did that and…

Tags: computers, Health, research, Technology, viruses