Influenza epidemics causes significant health issues and economic burden to the society. It is estimated that the annual epidemics result in 3 to 5 million cases of severe illness, and about 250,000 to 500,000 deaths worldwide (WHO, 2016). Economically, the influenza epidemics contribute a $87.1 billion burden on the United States (US) alone each year (Molinari et al., 2007). One way to reduce ...

Modeling disease spread and distribution using social media data has become an increasingly popular research area. While Twitter data has recently been investigated for estimating disease spread, the extent to which it is representative of disease spread and distribution in a macro perspective is still an open question. In this paper, we focus on macroscale modeling of influenza-like illnesses ...

Introduction The primary goal of syndromic surveillance is early recognition of disease trends, in order to identify and control infectious disease outbreaks, such as influenza. For surveillance of influenza-like illness (ILI), public health departments receive data from multiple sources with varying degrees of patient acuity, including outpatient clinics and emergency departments. However, the...

BACKGROUND Surveillance for influenza and influenza-like illness (ILI) is important for guiding public health prevention programs to mitigate the morbidity and mortality caused by influenza, including pandemic influenza. Nontraditional sources of data for influenza and ILI surveillance are of interest to public health authorities if their validity can be established. METHODS/PRINCIPAL FINDING...

A 15 year-old Filipino male was admitted to San Lazaro Hospital, Manila, Philippines for the first time on last June 9, 2009 complaining of fever and difficulty breathing. His condition started 3 days prior to admission as high grade fever accompanied by productive cough, chills and sore throat with painful swallowing (oedynophagia). Self medication with paracetamol and phenylpropanolamine was ...

Human parechoviruses (HPeV), previously designated as echovirus 22 and 23, belong to the Parechovirus genus within the Picornaviridae family and has been designated HPeV 1 and 2 respectively.1 The HPeV genome organization and disease spectrum are similar to other viruses in the Picornaviridae family. HPeV have been frequently associated with respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases in children...