Introduction Mitigating the spread of infectious disease is of great importance for policy makers. Taking the recent outbreak of Ebola as an example, it was difficult for policy makers to identify the best course of action based on the cost-effectiveness of what was available. In effort to address the needs of policy makers to mitigate the spread of infectious disease before an outbreak becomes...

BACKGROUND Infectious disease surveillance has recently seen many changes including rapid growth of informal surveillance, acting both as competitor and a facilitator to traditional surveillance, as well as the implementation of the revised International Health Regulations. The present study aims to compare outbreak reporting by formal and informal sources given such changes in the field. MET...

The availability of epidemiological data in the early stages of an outbreak of an infectious disease is vital for modelers to make accurate predictions regarding the likely spread of disease and preferred intervention strategies. However, in some countries, the necessary demographic data are only available at an aggregate scale. We investigated the ability of models of livestock infectious dise...

On March 12, 2004, a college student infectious with measles returned to Iowa from India by a commercial airliner; the case was subsequently linked to two other measles cases. This report updates information about this outbreak and provides details regarding vaccination, quarantine, and other measures used by Iowa public health authorities to interrupt disease transmission in a vulnerable popul...

Infectious diseases can constitute public health emergencies of international concern when a pathogen arises, acquires new characteristics, or is deliberately released, leading to the potential for loss of human lives as well as societal disruption. A wide range of risk drivers are now known to lead to and/or exacerbate the emergence and spread of infectious disease, including global trade and ...

Super-spreading events for infectious diseases occur when some infected individuals infect more than the average number of secondary cases. Several super-spreading individuals have been identified for the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). We develop a model for superspreading events of infectious diseases, which is based on the outbreak of SARS. Using this model we desc...

BACKGROUND Early warning systems for outbreaks of infectious diseases are an important application of the ecological theory of epidemics. A key variable predicted by early warning systems is the final outbreak size. However, for directly transmitted diseases, the stochastic contact process by which outbreaks develop entails fundamental limits to the precision with which the final size can be pr...

background : there are few published studies that use real data testing to examine the performance of outbreak detection methods. the aim of this study was to determine the performance of the exponentially weighted moving average (ewma) in real time detection of a local outbreak in mashhad city, eastern iran . methods : the ewma algorithms (both ewma 1 with λ=0.3 and ewma 2 with λ=0.6) were app...

three subheadings including treatment, prevention and control and diagnosis methods got the most priorities, respectively. although about half of the priorities are related to two subheadings including treatment and diagnosis methods, research priorities of prevention and control methods (22% of all priorities) indicate the importance of prevention for clinicians who gave scores to the titles. ...

Mathematical models provide a useful framework to investigate real-world problems. They can be used in the context of disease dynamics to study how a disease will spread and how we can stop or prevent an outbreak. In December of 2013, an outbreak of Ebola began in the West African country of Guinea and later spread to Sierra Leone and Liberia. Health Organisations like the US Centers for Diseas...