Nov 07, 2014 10:49 AM EST By J Baulkman, UniversityHerald Reporter

EdCast will tackle the question of how to stop Ebola with their newly launched healthcare-focused platform.

The online education platform provider's new project, health.edcast.org, will initially tackle the question of how to stop the spread of Ebola, a rare and deadly disease caused by infection with a strain of Ebola virus. The 2014 Ebola epidemic is the largest in history, affecting multiple countries in West Africa.

The new platform will also provide the "foundation for international organizations and universities to work together on [Ebola awareness] and other issues," Inside Higher Ed reported. Marcel Salathe, associate professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University, will teach a course on Ebola on the site.

EdCast is Silicon Valley's latest contribution to the ed-tech space. The company aims to help institutions -- including groups of institutions working together - "build their own online education platforms where they can run multiple instances of the same courses, removing the need for institutions to do the coding themselves," Inside Higher Ed reported.

According to a statistical forecast released in September by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Ebola epidemic could claim hundreds of thousands of lives and infect more than 1.4 million people by January 2015.

The forecast supports the drastically higher projections released earlier by a group of scientists, including epidemiologists with the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, who modeled the Ebola spread as part of a National Institutes of Health-sponsored project called Midas, short for Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study.

Before the scientists released results, the outbreak in West Africa was expected to be under control in nine months with only about 20,000 total cases. But modeling showed 20,000 people could be infected in just a single month.

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