background and objective: over 165 million cases of shigellosis occur in the world each year, mostly in developing countries. outbreaks of shigellosis are associated with poor sanitation, natural calamities, contaminated food and crowded living conditions. in late summer 2006, during the final stage of an outbreak of shigellosis at a vast region of isfahan province, naein & ardestan, our labora...

measles is a highly contagious viral disease that remains an important cause of mortality among children despite the availability of a safe and effective vaccine around the world. we aimed this study to show a measles out-break occurring.in early 2012, a report of measles outbreak was recorded on center for disease control (cdc) of fars province, south of iran. with this case-series study, char...

ebola virus disease (formerly known as ebola haemorrhagic fever) is a severe, often fatal illness, with a death rate of up to 90%. the illness affects humans and nonhuman primates (monkeys, gorillas, and chimpanzees). ebola first appeared in 1976 in two simultaneous outbreaks, one in a village near the ebola river in the democratic republic of congo, and the other in a remote area of sudan. the...

CONTENTS Introduction: an international workshop on the global burden of COPD K.R. Chapman, A.S. Buist, D.M. Mannino, J.B. Soriano and P.A. Vermeire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 Worldwide epidemiology of COPD and BOLD A.S. Buist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Surveillance of COPD:...

OBJECTIVE Broadly, this research aims to improve the outbreak detection performance and, therefore, the cost effectiveness of automated syndromic surveillance systems by building novel, recombinant temporal aberration detection algorithms from components of previously developed detectors. METHODS This study decomposes existing temporal aberration detection algorithms into two sequential stage...

Tornadoes often strike as isolated events, but many occur as part of a major outbreak of tornadoes. Nontornadic outbreaks of severe convective storms are more common across the United States but pose different threats than do those associated with a tornado outbreak. The main goal of this work is to distinguish between significant instances of these outbreak types objectively by using statistic...

Health care officials are increasingly concerned with knowing early whether an outbreak of a particular disease is unfolding. We often have daily counts of some variable that are indicative of the number of individuals in a given community becoming sick each day with a particular disease. By monitoring these daily counts we can possibly detect an outbreak in an early stage. A number of classica...

The paper presents a method for syndromic surveillance of an epidemic outbreak due to an emerging disease, formulated in the context of stochastic nonlinear filtering. The dynamics of the epidemic is modeled using a stochastic compartmental epidemiological model with inhomogeneous mixing. The syndromic (typically non-medical) observations of the number of infected people (e.g. visits to pharmac...