INTRODUCTION Adherence to vaccination program for Influenza virus is an important issue of Public Health in presence of many no-vaccine tendencies. The media event about some deaths, occurring after MF59 adjuvanted vaccine administration, has characterized the season 2014/15 vaccination program in Italy. Aim of the study is vaccination adherence assessment of the current season with regards to ...

We studied the association between OTC pharmaceutical sales and volume of patients with influenza-like-illnesses (ILI) at an urgent care center over one year. OTC pharmaceutical sales explain 36% of the variance in the patient volume, and each standard deviation increase is associated with 4.7 more patient visits to the urgent care center (p<0.0001). Cross-correlation function analysis demonstr...

BACKGROUND Google Flu Trends was developed to estimate US influenza-like illness (ILI) rates from internet searches; however ILI does not necessarily correlate with actual influenza virus infections. METHODS AND FINDINGS Influenza activity data from 2003-04 through 2007-08 were obtained from three US surveillance systems: Google Flu Trends, CDC Outpatient ILI Surveillance Network (CDC ILI Sur...

Seasonal influenza infection is a major challenge in public health. The term "seasonal influenza" refers to the typical increase in the number of influenza patients in the winter season in temperature zones. However, it is not clear how environmental factors within a single flu season affect influenza infection in a human population. Therefore, we evaluated the effects of temperature and humidi...

This research describes a novel, alignment-free method of genomic sequence comparisons based on absent nucleotide words and expression levels. Testing this method on Influenza A virus isolates, three classifications are presented which successfully identify; 1) the geographic origins of domestic bird H5N1 isolates through China and Southeast Asia during 2006, 2) the country of human H5N1 isolat...

We describe a data-driven unsupervised machine learning approach to extract geo-temporal co-occurrence patterns of asthma and the flu from large-scale electronic healthcare reimbursement claims (eHRC) datasets. Specifically, we examine the eHRC data from 2009 to 2010 pandemic H1N1 influenza season and analyze whether different geographic regions within the United States (US) showed an increase ...

BACKGROUND The first prospective clinical Flu Vaccination in Acute Coronary Syndromes (FLUVACS) Trial has provided some evidence that flu vaccination together with standard therapy may be useful during the winter season to reduce the risk of death and major cardiac events in patients with acute myocardial infarction. PATIENTS AND METHOD Information available in the FLUVACS database was analyz...