Spencer J Fox

This is actually fairly normal for measles, with countries often coming in and out of elimination status (figure from the paper showing those dynamics). It's important now to redouble vaccination efforts to get elimination status back on track!

Canada Is About to Lose Its Status as Having Eliminated Measles

In the NYT today, a discussion of how Canada will lose their measles elimination status. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/w...

This was predictable and preventable, something Amy Winter and I discussed in our disease watch piece 4 months ago: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Multi-model approach to understand and predict past and future dengue epidemic dynamics

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Brilliant work by @cathalmills.bsky.social + many others

Postdoctoral Scholar - Flagstaff, Arizona, United States Special Information This position is an on-site position which requires the incumbent to complete their work primarily at an NAU site, campus, or facility with or without accommodation. Opportunities...

A new postdoc position just opened in our group at NAU! We are looking for someone to lead our current forecasting activities and the development of our next generation AI/ML models! Don't hesitate to reach out to me with any questions! careers.nau.edu/jobs/postdoc...

Check out our new paper @nejm.org. RSV, COVID-19 & Influenza vaccines continue to show consistent effectiveness & safety based on a review & synthesis of 500+ research studies👇! We worked hard to evaluate the evidence so you can be confident about getting vaccinated this fall!

Pandemic-era sports league operations as a new paradigm for local epidemic resilience Strategic, coordinated, and rapid responses are essential when pathogens emerge, yet these responses are often mishandled during epidemics due to myriad factors, including entrenched socioeconomic and...

1/5: Interested in basketball? Disease ecology? Epidemics?

5 years ago, the NBA embarked on a great experiment in infection control: "The NBA Bubble." In a new preprint led by Dr. Yun Tao + Dr. Nita Bharti, we examine it's underlying disease ecology principles.

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

The Fox Lab Statistical and computational epidemiology

Took some time to update the lab website with a couple new posts and lab news! Check it out to hear about some lab changes and recent fun things we've been up to! thefoxlab.wordpress.com

Just published! Our new work on a method to add epi info to any forecast model. We showed that it improved the performance of all forecast models we tested including ensembles. Now we hope to deploy it in real-time to see how well it works: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A New Tool for Healthcare Gives Better Outbreak Forecasts Pinpointing an outbreak’s peak, the approach can boost health systems’ preparedness and risk communication.

A new approach called “epimodulation” — developed by UT Austin researchers & collaborators — predicts epidemic peaks better than current models and could boost health care preparations in future outbreaks.

#Epidemiology #PublicHealth @texas-ib.bsky.social
cns.utexas.edu/news/researc...

John talks about the route of exposure with ingestion leading to high viral counts, and an inverse of this has been the possible low viral load when people have gotten eye-based infections. I think that could also contribute to the lower mortality seen in the US

Understanding avian influenza mortality Three theories could explain why the North American H5N1 epidemic has not been more deadly

Why has H5N1 not been as deadly as we were expecting so far? Really liked this summary of the evidence and possible explanations by @jdrakephd.bsky.social

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

Modeling the Health Impact of Discontinuing COVID-19 Vaccination During Pregnancy in the US This decision analytical model study estimates the number of avertable COVID-19 hospitalizations in US infants younger than 6 months and pregnant persons with vaccinations during pregnancy.

What is the impact of the HHS decision to no longer recommend COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy? In our new research letter in @jamapediatrics.com, we provide estimates on the number of infant hospitalizations under different vaccine scenarios here. @mathewkiang.com, @peterhotezmdphd.bsky.social

An example from our now-defunct COVID-19 forecast dashboard: covid-19.tacc.utexas.edu/dashboards/t...

How to Read Spaghetti Models During Hurricane Season | Weather.com Understanding this delicious-sounding term will help you this hurricane season.

Was excited to see an explanation for spaghetti models for hurricane forecasts. We use these for infectious disease forecasting too! weather.com/science/weat...

No university will pay $100k for an H-1B visa. These visas are primarily used for postdocs, and nobody can justify paying an extra $100k for that type of position. That's an entire additional year of postdoc funding. 1/2

The Legionnaire's Disease cluster in Central Harlem has now grown to 58 cases. 21 hospitalized.

Tragically there has been a 2nd death.

If you live or work in zip codes 10027, 10030, 10035, 10037 or 10039 and you develop flu-like symptoms, contact a health care provider immediately.

From Senator @murray.senate.gov: the Senate's proposed NIH budget would reject 40% cuts, increase funding by $400M.

"We're not going to give up the fight against cancer, Alzheimer's or rare diseases."

Message to scientists: "we support you. We need you to stay here & keep this research going."

1 dead, multiple people sickened in Legionnaires' disease cluster in New York City New York City officials said they are investigating a cluster of Legionnaires' disease that has caused one death and nearly two dozen illnesses.

“The Legionnaires' disease cluster is in Central Harlem. According to NYC Health, the following zip codes are affected:

10027
10030
10035
10037
10039

People who live or work around these ZIP codes and develop flu-like symptoms should see a health care provider right away, the agency said.”

Wow! I’m actually surprised we haven’t seen more of this unfortunately… hoping federal funding stabilizes soon 🤞

I will be part of the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS) and the center for Community Health and Engaged Research (CHER) there and will soon post announcements for postdoc and graduate student positions. Feel free to reach out to me beforehand if you’re interested!

I announced it at SISMID so now to make it official. In August the Fox lab will be moving to NAU in Flagstaff AZ. I am so sad to leave all my wonderful UGA colleagues, but am excited to settle permanently in the Southwest near these mountains and the desert.

Thank you to the authors for such a nice contribution to the field and giving me an easy thing to cite when these issues crop up 🙏 🙏 🙏

I think it has large implications for seasonal diseases like flu, covid, and RSV. Since initial susceptibility is so hard to pin down and reporting rates change every season, it means we need auxiliary data sets (e.g. serological data) at the beginning of the season to make predictions.

To get around this problem in practice we typically assume that everyone in the population is susceptible or fix the reporting rate at some reasonable value, but this paper is a reminder that those decisions wholly determine the parameters we estimate, so we need to be very careful

Identifiability in epidemic models with prior immunity and under-reporting Identifiability is the property in mathematical modelling that determines if model parameters can be uniquely estimated from data. For infectious disease models, failure to ensure identifiability can ...

Been thinking about this preprint a lot the past couple of weeks: arxiv.org/abs/2506.07825

It says that for an outbreak you cannot estimate a transmission rate, initial susceptibility pool, and reporting rate together. This makes sense intuitively but it’s nice to have the proof

This will be Qianying and my second time teaching the course and we have a bunch of updated and new material for everyone

Enjoyed wildflower season in the mountains this weekend and now I’m on my way to teach Simulation-based inference of epidemiological dynamics at SISMID! See y’all in Atlanta soon!

This is so cool to play with!

Great way to stay in touch with all of the amazing infectious disease modeling work happening these days: