in this commentary, we argue for the implementation of a sugar-sweetened beverage (ssb) tax as a tool to help address the global obesity and diabetes epidemics. consumption of ssbs has increased exponentially over the last several decades, a trend that has been an important contributor to the obesity and diabetes epidemics. prior evidence demonstrates that a ssb tax will likely decrease ssb con...

Very few Pacific islands escaped the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. Subsequent influenza epidemics in the established colonial outposts of American Samoa and New Caledonia infected many but killed very few persons whereas the extraordinarily isolated Niue, Rotuma, Jaliut and Yule islands experienced high mortality influenza epidemics (>3% of population) following 1918. These dichotomous outcomes...

Environmental pollution, quality problems and economic constraints require decreasing the use of pesticides in agriculture. To do so, integrated crop protection aims at developing new strategies that take into account the effects of the agricultural practices on the epidemics development. This requires predicting the development of the epidemics under particular crop practices. This, in turn, r...

BACKGROUND Acute respiratory infections (ARI) are a major cause of sickness absenteeism among health care workers (HCWs) and contribute significantly to overall productivity loss particularly during influenza epidemics. The purpose of this study is to quantify the increases in absenteeism during epidemics including the 2009 influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 pandemic. METHODS We analysed administrative d...

Internet epidemics are malicious software that can self-propagate across the Internet, i.e., compromise vulnerable hosts and use them to attack other victims. Since the early stage of the Internet, epidemics have caused enormous damages and been a significant security threat. For example, the Morris worm infected 10% of all hosts in the Internet in 1988; the Code Red worm compromised at least 3...

Many epidemics of plant diseases are characterized by large variability among individual outbreaks. However, individual epidemics often follow a well-defined trajectory which is much more predictable in the short term than the ensemble (collection) of potential epidemics. In this paper, we introduce a modelling framework that allows us to deal with individual replicated outbreaks, based upon a ...

Until the mid-20th century, mortality rates were often very high during measles epidemics, particularly among previously isolated populations (e.g., islanders), refugees/internees who were forcibly crowded into camps, and military recruits. Searching for insights regarding measles mortality rates, we reviewed historical records of measles epidemics on the Polynesian island of Rotuma (in 1911), ...

We show that the steady states of the White and Comiskey [E. White, C. Comiskey, Heroin epidemics, treatment and ODE modelling, Math. Biosci. 208 (2007) 312-324.] model of heroin epidemics are stable.

Abstract Satellite data are widely used to study the spatial component of epidemics: monitor their evolution, create epidemiological risk maps and predictive models. The improvement quality, not only in technical terms but also scientific relevance robustness, represents this context one most important aspects for health information technology that can make further significant useful progress m...