0173 For disease outbreak detection, the public-health community has historically relied on the watchful eyes of doctors and other health-care workers, who have reported individual cases or clusters of cases of particular diseases to healthcare and other authorities. The increased availability of electronic health-care data, however, raises the possibility of more automated and earlier outbreak...

Even though hepatitis A mass vaccination effectiveness is high, outbreaks continue to occur. The aim of this study was to investigate the association between duration and characteristics of hepatitis A outbreaks. Hepatitis A (HA) outbreaks reported between 1991 and 2007 were studied. An outbreak was defined as ≥2 epidemiologically-linked cases with ≥1 case laboratory-confirmed by detection of H...

BACKGROUND Global outbreak detection and reporting have generally improved for a variety of infectious diseases and geographic regions in recent decades. Nevertheless, lags in outbreak reporting remain a threat to the global human health and economy. In the time between first occurrence of a novel disease incident and public notification of an outbreak, infected individuals have a greater possi...

INTRODUCTION In July 2014, Nigeria experienced an outbreak of Ebola virus disease following the introduction of the disease by an ill Liberian Traveler. The Government of Nigeria with the support of Technical and Development Partners responded quickly and effectively to contain the outbreak. The epidemiological profile of the outbreak that majorly affected two States in the country in terms of ...

0173 For disease outbreak detection, the public-health community has historically relied on the watchful eyes of doctors and other health-care workers, who have reported individual cases or clusters of cases of particular diseases to healthcare and other authorities. The increased availability of electronic health-care data, however, raises the possibility of more automated and earlier outbreak...

0173 For disease outbreak detection, the public-health community has historically relied on the watchful eyes of doctors and other health-care workers, who have reported individual cases or clusters of cases of particular diseases to healthcare and other authorities. The increased availability of electronic health-care data, however, raises the possibility of more automated and earlier outbreak...

BACKGROUND Blastomycosis is a potentially life-threatening infection caused by the soil-based dimorphic fungus Blastomyces dermatitidis, which is endemic throughout much of the Midwestern United States. We investigated an increase in reported cases of blastomycosis that occurred during 2009-2010 in Marathon County, Wisconsin. METHODS Case detection was conducted using the Wisconsin Electronic...

In July 2006, public health services investigated an outbreak of acute gastroenteritis among staff and visitors of a popular ski resort in southern New Zealand. The source of the outbreak was a drinking water supply contaminated by human sewage. The virological component of the investigation played a major role in confirming the source of the outbreak. Drinking water, source stream water, and 3...

BACKGROUND Rapid response to outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases is impeded by uncertain diagnoses and delayed communication. Understanding the effect of inefficient response is a potentially important contribution of epidemic theory. To develop this understanding we studied societal learning during emerging outbreaks wherein patient removal accelerates as information is gathered and diss...

For the purpose of developing a national system for outbreak surveillance, local outbreak signals were compared in three sources of syndromic data--telephone triage of acute gastroenteritis, web queries about symptoms of gastrointestinal illness, and over-the-counter (OTC) pharmacy sales of antidiarrhoeal medication. The data sources were compared against nine known waterborne and foodborne out...