Studying disease with R: RECON, The R Epidemics Consortium

For almost a year now, a collection of researchers from around the world has been collaborating to develop the next generation of analysis tools for disease outbreak response using R. The R Epidemics Consortium (RECON) creates R packages for handling, visualizing, and analyzing outbreak data using cutting-edge statistical methods, along with general-purpose tools for data cleaning, versioning, and encryption, and system infrastructure. Like ROpenSci, the Epidemics Consortium is focused on developing efficient, reliable, and accessible open-source tools, but with a focus on epidemology as opposed to science generally.

The Epidemics Consortium has already created several useful resources for epidemiology:

• outbreaks, an R package containing a collection of disease outbreak data
• epicontacts, an R package for handling epidemiological contact data
• incidence, an R package to compute, visualize and model disease incidents
• A tutorial on phylogenetics with R
• A set of guidelines for package development

There are also a large number of additional packages under development.

RECON welcomes new members, particularly experienced R developers and as public health officers specialized in outbreak response. You can find information on how to join here, and general information about the R Epidemics Consortium at the link below.

RECON: The R Epidemics Consortium (via Maëlle Salmon‏)