The use of patient temperature data for biosurveillance in the emergency department DG Cochrane, and JR Allegra New Jersey Research Foundation, Morristown Memorial Hospital Residency in Emergency Medicine, Morristown, NJ, USA E-mail: [email protected] Introduction Biosurveillance systems commonly use emergency department (ED) patient chief complaint data (CC) for surveillance of influenza-li...

INTRODUCTION Bhutan is progressing toward malaria elimination. The purpose of this evaluation was to assess the ability of the surveillance system from 2006 to 2012 to meet the objectives of the Bhutan Vector-borne Disease Control Program (VDCP) and to highlight priorities requiring attention as the nation transitions to elimination. METHODS The evaluation was conducted using the Center for D...

We developed a model that enabled a back-calculation of the annual salmonellosis seroincidence from measurements of Salmonella antibodies and applied this model to 9677 serum samples collected from populations in 13 European countries. We found a 10-fold difference in the seroincidence, which was lowest in Sweden (0.06 infections per person-year), Finland (0.07), and Denmark (0.08) and highest ...

In the last three decades, disease surveillance has grown into a complete discipline, quite distinct from epidemiology. This expansion into a separate scientific area within public health has not been accompanied by parallel growth in the literature about its principles and methods. The development of the fundamental concepts of surveillance systems provides a basis on which to build a better u...

To address health disparities, local health departments need high-resolution data on subpopulations and geographic regions, but the quality and availability of these data are often suboptimal. The Boston Public Health Commission and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health faced challenges in acquiring and using community-level data essential for the design and implementation of progr...

Surveillance plays a crucial role in public health and for obvious reasons conflicts with individual privacy. This article argues that the predominant approach to the conflict--relying on a conceptual distinction between research and practice--is problematic and then offers an alternative. It outlines a basic interests approach to public health measures and an unreasonable exercise argument, wh...

BACKGROUND Investigation into personal health has become focused on conditions at an increasingly local level, while response rates have declined and complicated the process of collecting data at an individual level. Simultaneously, social media data have exploded in availability and have been shown to correlate with the prevalence of certain health conditions. OBJECTIVE Facebook likes may be...

BACKGROUND Public health nurses have a central function in the public health system. Nurses conduct disease surveillance, which is an important first step in recognizing diseases caused by bioterrorist agents. Unfortunately, the current public health infrastructure and expectations for public health nurses are not clearly defined and therefore pose serious difficulties for conducting disease su...

We demonstrate an early version of a semantic web tool, Global Health Explorer (GHX), that can be used to conduct public health surveillance using Twitter. Our infrastructure can use any controlled vocabulary to extract term uses in Twitter and supports hypothesis formation and exploration of data sets using visual analysis. The resulting data, gathered in RDF, makes it possible to analyze term...

PUBLIC HEALTH SURVEILLANCE is the ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of data regarding a health-related event that enables public health authorities to reduce morbidity and mortality.1 Surveillance serves many public health functions—for example, estimating the burden of a disease or injury, portraying the natural history of a condition, determining the ...