The healthcare setting was important in the early spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in both Toronto and Taiwan. Healthcare workers, patients, and visitors were at increased risk for infection. Nonetheless, the ability of individual SARS patients to transmit disease was quite variable. Unrecognized SARS case-patients were a primary source of transmission, and early detection and...

Real world pandemics such as SARS 2002 as well as popular fiction like the movie Contagion graphically depict the health threat of a global pandemic and the key role of epidemic intelligence (EI). While EI relies heavily on established indicator sources a new class of methods based on event alerting from unstructured digital Internet media is rapidly becoming acknowledged within the public heal...

Shelf syndrome occurs mainly in younger people (particularly athletes) and rarely in elderly people. We report on 3 elderly patients with a medial synovial plica causing severe pain and locked knees. They had had no symptoms in their early or middle life. After removal of the shelf, the symptoms improved considerably. Although shelf syndrome is rare in the elderly, it should be suspected whenev...

Background: Chemokines play important roles in inflammation and antiviral action. We examined whether polymorphisms of RANTES, IP-10 and Mig affect the susceptibility to and outcome of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

Observational studies usually agree with randomised, controlled trials. It is a logical fallacy, however, to suggest that agreement in one direction implies prediction in the other direction. Observational studies are not scientifically capable of proving or disproving hypotheses such as the efficacy and safety of the treatment of severe sepsis with antithrombin. Observational studies are diffi...

The influence of age structure in the susceptible class of the Susceptible-Infected Recovered (SIR) model used to describe the transmission of dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF) was studied. This was done by first dividing all of the population classes into cohorts and then writing a set of coupled SIR equations for each cohort. The consequences of assuming different behavior of the transmission ra...