Experts to bet on bird flu

Think bird flu will become a worldwide threat this summer? Wanna put some money on that?

In an unusual effort to better predict the advance of a potential flu pandemic, public health experts will be staked about $100 apiece to bet on the spread of bird flu. This type of grim futures market has also been created to predict hurricanes and temporarily, a few years ago, terrorist attacks.

In this case, the goal is to develop a faster way to collect expert opinion about the potential spread of a deadly disease outbreak.

“Farmers have used futures markets for decades to make decisions about what crops to plant. We’re just borrowing that concept to help people in public health and healthcare make decisions about the future,” said Dr. Phil Polgreen, a University of Iowa assistant professor of medicine who helped create the project. It’s being funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is donating nearly $250,000 to the effort.

Organizers hope to recruit at least 100 epidemiologists, veterinarians and other medical experts from around the world for the two-year project.