Traditional public health practice has relied on public health surveillance of disease to detect outbreaks in an effort to mitigate their effects. Often the earlier an outbreak is detected, the greater the mitigation of its effects. The logical extension of this relationship is to predict outbreaks before they occur. A predictive model for an emerging infectious disease would forecast, when and where an outbreak of a given disease will occur, well before its emergence. This is a challenging task and truly predictive models for emerging infectious diseases and is still in their infancy.
Objective
This paper addresses the problem of predicting outbreaks of diseases of military importance in a chosen region of the world, one to several months in advance.