In a new study, published in Science Advances, researchers at the University of Notre Dame analyzed more than 80 outbreaks of chikungunya virus to improve prediction of future outbreaks and inform vaccine trial development.

“Chikungunya outbreaks are unpredictable in both size and severity,” said Alex Perkins, the Ann and Daniel Monahan Collegiate Professor of infectious disease epidemiology in the Department of Biological Sciences, and co-author of the study. “You can have one outbreak that infects just a few people, and another in a similar setting that infects tens of thousands. That unpredictability is what makes public health planning — and vaccine development — so difficult.”

For the study, Alexander Meyer, a postdoctoral researcher in Perkins’ lab and lead author of the study, and a team of researchers reconstructed and analyzed 86 chikungunya outbreaks, creating the largest comparative dataset of its kind.

“Instead of looking at outbreaks in isolation, looking at many, all of which varied in size and severity, allowed us to search for patterns among them,” Meyer said.