Tracing the spatial spread of pathogens is a key objective of molecular infectious disease epidemiology. Accordingly, a wide range of genotyping approaches have been used to monitor the dissemination of Staphylococcus aureus strains, from localized outbreaks to global spread. We provide a critical review of available methods, revealing that molecular markers currently in use for typing S. aureu...

Person, place, time: these are the basic elements of outbreak investigations and epidemiology. Historically, however, the focus in epidemiologic research has been on person and time, with little regard for the implications of place or space even though disease mapping has been done for over a hundred years. The development of geographic information systems (GISs) over the last 20 years has prov...

As defined by Elliott and Wartenberg (2004), spatial epidemiology is the description and analysis of geographic variations in disease with respect to demographic, environmental, behavioral, socioeconomic, genetic, and infectious risk factors. Spatial analyses abound in the epidemiological literature, with an early example found in the monograph edited by Doll (1984) on the geography of disease,...

During the last three decades, Bayesian methods have developed greatly in the field of epidemiology. Their main challenge focusses around computation, but the advent of Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods (MCMC) and in particular of the WinBUGS software has opened the doors of Bayesian modelling to the wide research community. However model complexity and database dimension still remain a constrai...

Event Detection Identifying patterns of interest in large temporal datasets Spatial Scan Statistic A method for identifying hotspots in spatial data, widely used in epidemiology and biosurveillance Scoring Function An objective function that measures the anomalousness of a subset of data LTSS Linear-time subset scanning Time to Detect Evaluation metric; time delay before detecting an event Over...