Introduction The shift from adult education to lifelong learning has not only impacted on the role and position of the adult educator, but has also had a profound effect on the legitimation of the learning of adults. Whereas adult education has historically been connected with learning for personal development and empowerment and learning for social inclusiveness and democratic understanding an...

BACKGROUND Dengue is an increasingly incident disease across many parts of the world. In response, an evidence-based handbook to translate research into policy and practice was developed. This handbook facilitates contingency planning as well as the development and use of early warning and response systems for dengue fever epidemics, by identifying decision-making processes that contribute to t...

A case-control study was performed to identify clinical predictors for Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infection among patients with acute febrile illness during the nosocomial outbreak. Patients with MERS-CoV were more likely to have monocytosis with normal white blood cell (WBC) count and lower C-reactive protein (CRP) level. Simple laboratory data such as complete blo...

BACKGROUND Time series methods are commonly used to detect disease outbreak signatures (e.g., signals due to influenza outbreaks and anthrax attacks) from varying respiratory-related diagnostic or syndromic data sources. Typically this involves two components: (i) Using time series methods to model the baseline background distribution (the time series process that is assumed to contain no outbr...

Background: The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa was the largest on record, resulting in over 25,000 total infections and 15,000 total deaths. Mathematical modeling can be used to investigate the mechanisms driving transmission during this outbreak – in particular, burial practices appear to have been major source of infections. Methodology/Principal Findings: We developed a multi-stage model...

Background. Dengue outbreaks are occurring with increasing frequency and intensity. Evidence-based epidemic preparedness and effective response are now a matter of urgency. Therefore, we have analysed national and municipal dengue outbreak response plans. Methods. Thirteen country plans from Asia, Latin America and Australia, and one international plan were obtained from the World Health Organi...

Infectious disease outbreaks recapitulate biology: they emerge from the multi-level interaction of hosts, pathogens, and their shared environment. As a result, predicting when, where, and how far diseases will spread requires a complex systems approach to modeling. Recent studies have demonstrated that predicting different components of outbreaks–e.g., the expected number of cases, pace and tem...

background: the outbreaks of foodborne diseases is a major health problem and occur daily in all countries, from the most to the least developed. this study is the first report of foodborne outbreaks in iran that carried out from 2006 to 2011. methods: a retrospective, longitudinal study carried out using foodborne disease national surveillance system data from 2006-2011, which have been report...