Introduction To meet the long-term needs of public health and social development of China, it is in urgency to establish a comprehensive response system and crisis management mechanism for public health emergencies. Syndromic surveillance system has great advantages in promoting early detection of epidemics and reducing the burden of disease outbreak confirmation (1). The effective method to se...

BACKGROUND An Ebola outbreak started in December 2013 in Guinea and spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone in 2014. The health systems in place in the three countries lacked the infrastructure and the preparation to respond to the outbreak quickly and the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a public health emergency of international concern on August 8 2014. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study w...

An outbreak detection and response system, using time series moving percentile method based on historical data, in China has been used for identifying dengue fever outbreaks since 2008. For dengue fever outbreaks reported from 2009 to 2012, this system achieved a sensitivity of 100%, a specificity of 99.8% and a median time to detection of 3 days, which indicated that the system was a useful de...

This paper explores the strategic importance of information systems for managing such crises as the H1N1 outbreak and the Haiti earthquake in the healthcare service chain. The paper synthesizes the literature on crisis management and information systems for emergency response and draws some key lessons for healthcare service chains. The paper illustrates these lessons by using data from an empi...

In the course of a hospital management takeover, a microbial outbreak took place in a tertiary neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Here, we characterize the outbreak and its management. About 4 months prior to takeover, there was a sharp increase in positive isolates for MSSA and multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs). Simultaneously, the nursing staff sick leave rate increased dramatically whi...

The mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins) (MPB) has infested and killed millions of hectares of lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta var. latifolia Engelm) forests in British Columbia, Canada, over the past decade. It is now spreading out of its native range into the Canadian boreal forest, with unknown social, economic and ecological consequences. This review explores the ramificati...

Background: The Covid-19 pandemic continues to adversely affect healthcare systems globally. Developed and underdeveloped countries continue to strive towards sustainable health policies that will help in containing the spread and at the same time managing positive cases. Global policy initiatives since the confirmation of the outbreak is guided by the recommendations from the World health orga...

BACKGROUND The current West African outbreak of the Ebola virus disease (EVD) began in Guinea in December 2013 and rapidly spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone. On 20 July 2014, a sick individual flew into Lagos, Nigeria, from Monrovia, Liberia, setting off an outbreak in Lagos and later in Port Harcourt city. The government of Nigeria, supported by the World Health Organization and other partner...

The management of an organisational outbreak of meningococcal disease using the national Guidelines for the early clinical and public health management of meningococcal disease in Australia (the Guidelines), could be considered a relatively straightforward task. Nevertheless, discretional judgements are often still required by the outbreak control team, as no guidelines can fully cover every ev...