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President Bush has announced his emergency plan for "Pandemic Influenza Preparations and Response" -- with a price tag of $7.1 billion. Having learned a lesson from Hurricane Katrina, where spot-on predictive scientific models of bursting levees and disastrous flooding were ignored, the White House -- to its credit -- now takes the threat of a global influenza pandemic quite seriously. But exactly how good is epidemic prediction? Worth a $7 billion bet?

As the threat of a potential influenza pandemic looms, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, believe that a 1960s traffic safety model can be a useful tool for preparing for a potential outbreak.

Two liquids—oil and alcohol—contribute to road fatalities, according to researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, University of California at Irvine and the Global Forum for Health Research, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Eric K. Noji, MD, MPH, a senior associate with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Department of International Health, has been elected into the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies.