BACKGROUND An Escherichia coli O104:H4 outbreak in Germany in summer 2011 caused 53 deaths, over 4000 individual infections across Europe, and considerable economic, social and political impact. This outbreak was the first in a position to exploit rapid, benchtop high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies and crowdsourced data analysis early in its investigation, establishing a new paradigm ...

African Horsesickness (AHS) is a controlled disease in South Africa. The country is divided into an infected area and a control area. An outbreak of AHS in the control area can result in a ban of exports for at least 2 years. A retrospective epidemiological study was carried out on data collected during the 2004 AHS outbreak in the surveillance zone of the AHS control area in the Western Cape P...

African horse sickness (AHS) is a controlled animal disease in South Africa, and as a result of the high mortality rates experienced, outbreaks in the AHS controlled area in the Western Cape Province have a significant impact on affected properties as well as on the exportation of live horses from the AHS free zone in metropolitan Cape Town. An outbreak of AHS serotype 1 occurred in the surveil...

BACKGROUND The multi-state fungal meningitis outbreak started in September 2012 in Tennessee. The cause of the outbreak was injection of contaminated lots of methylprednisolone acetate used in epidural spinal injections. Roanoke and New River Valley were the epicenter of this outbreak in Virginia, with two clinical centers having administered the contaminated injections to their patients. New R...

OBJECTIVES The main objectives of this study were to establish baseline characteristics for milkborne outbreaks, establish an expected milkborne outbreak profile, and identify potential indicators of food terrorism. MATERIALS This study used 1990-2006 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Annual Listings of Disease Outbreaks and the Foodborne Outbreak Database (FOOD) to est...

Background. Foodborne disease is estimated to cause 48 million illnesses annually in the US resulting in 3000 deaths [1]. Although most infections occur as sporadic cases, outbreak surveillance offers valuable insight about the foods and pathogens responsible for illnesses [2]. A total of 1632 foodborne disease outbreaks were reported during 20112012 [3] and recent data indicates an overall dec...

An epidemic curve is a graph in which the number of new cases of an outbreak disease is plotted against time. Epidemic curves are ordinarily constructed after the disease outbreak is over. However, a good estimate of the epidemic curve early in an outbreak would be invaluable to health care officials. Currently, techniques for predicting the severity of an outbreak are very limited. As far as p...

We study the Chapman Jouguet (CJ) model and the selfsimilar Zeldovich von Neumann Do ring (SZND) model in chemically reacting gas flows. We discover some basic relationships among ignition temperature Ti , total chemical binding energy Q, and the adibatic exponent # of polytropic gas. From these relations, we can determine when temperatures along the SZND burning solutions are higher than the i...