These studies thus concluded that rigorous social distancing in the form of long-duration school LY2157299 closure Reversine represents a tradeoff between economic cost and effectiveness in saving lives. By contrast, we found that for a pandemic with R of 1.8, adding continuous school closure to an antiviral treatment and extended prophylaxis strategy was cost effective when the case fatality ratio was 1.5% or greater; that is, for severity categories 4 and 5. The reason for this difference is due to these related studies not including higher costs which may reasonably be associated with higher pandemic severity. The approach taken in this study assumed increased hospitalisation and ICU rates occurring along with higher CFRs, whilst the related studies have hospitalisation rates fixed to the attack rate, which is independent of pandemic severity. Rates of severe health outcomes which incurred medical costs were assumed to be proportional to the attack rate, but not proportional to the case fatality ratio, as adopted in this study. As a result, potential savings in medical costs due as a result of interventions were no higher for the more severe pandemics, and there was no pandemic severity at which the more expensive interventions, such as continuous school closure, became cost effective. A previous paper by the authors examined the cost effectiveness of interventions used in the “mild” 2009 pandemic, which assumed a very low CFR of 0.006% and a reproduction number of 1.2, derived from data supplied by the Health Department of Western Australia. Comprehensive analyses by others of the probable CFR for the 2009 pandemic resulted in us defining a category 0 CFR of 0.03% to represent the severity of this pandemic. Mass rearing of biocontrol insects is important given the environmental, health and resistance issues associated with the use of chemical insecticides. To achieve an effective level of control, however, requires a large number of beneficial insects be available at low cost for their augmentative and inoculative release. Conventional rearing methods require raising natural prey and host insects on host plants. The extensive input necessary for this method makes the use of beneficial insects economically unfeasible. However, the development of artificial diets could considerably reduce the mass propagation costs of beneficial insects. The current method for optimizing diet is to measure a few preselected biochemical and physiological parameters to test the effect of changes in diet formulation on insect performance. Typically, diet components are changed one at a time and insect performance is tested after each change. This endeavor is time-consuming, taking years to decades to optimize a diet, with many attempts ending in failure. To accelerate diet development, a more direct method that can provide informative feedback to target deficiencies in diet formulation is required. Nutrigenomics examines how nutrition affects gene expression patterns and offers not only a means to measure an insect’s response to changes in the food stream but also provides information on diet limitations. Using suppressive subtractive hybridization, Yocum et al. discovered two artificial diet up-regulated and two prey up-regulated transcript fragments in the predatory pentatomid Perillus bioculatus, and a BLASTx search found similarities for two diet up-regulated clones.