Mass treatment/prophylaxis during an outbreak of infectious syphilis in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Heterosexual outbreak of infectious syphilis: epidemiological and ethnographic analysis and implications for control.

This study describes the epidemiology and ethnography of an outbreak of infectious syphilis in Vancouver, British Columbia. Between 1996 and 1999, British Columbias's rate of infectious syphilis rose from 0.5 to 3.4 per 100,000, with a dense concentration of cases among sex trade workers, their clients, and street-involved people in the downtown eastside area of Vancouver. Sexual networks were ...

Ebola Treatment and Prevention are not the only Battles: Understanding Ebola-related Fear and Stigma

Early Real-time Estimation of Infectious Disease Reproduction Number

When an infectious disease strikes a population, the number of newly reported cases is often the only available information that one can obtain during early stages of the outbreak. An important goal of early outbreak analysis is to obtain a reliable estimate for the basic reproduction number, R0, from the limited information available. We present a novel method that enables us to make a reliabl...

Colonization of Cryptoccous gattii in British Columbia

During 1999, the eastern portion of Vancouver Island, British Columbia began experiencing an outbreak of a rare cryptococcal disease previously known to exist only in tropical and sub-tropical regions. It is thought that this outbreak on Vancouver Island is the world’s largest outbreak of cryptococcosis ever identified. It is not yet understood how this pathogen, widely regarded as a “tropical”...

Time to Shift from Systems Thinking-Talking to Systems Thinking-Action; Comment on “Constraints to Applying Systems Thinking Concepts in Health Systems: A Regional Perspective from Surveying Stakeholders in Eastern Mediterranean Countries”

A recent International Journal of Health Policy and Management (IJHPM) article by Fadi El-Jardali and colleagues makes an important contribution to the literature on health system strengthening by reporting on a survey of healthcare stakeholders in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) about Systems Thinking (ST). The study’s main contributions are its confirmation that healthcare stakeholde...