From the recognition of the swine flu pandemic in late April 2009, health professionals, politicians and the public needed to know how serious pandemic (H1N1) 2009 influenza (swine flu) was in relation to other seasonal strains of influenza. The Victorian experience suggests that the circulation of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 influenza in the community was at most like influenza circulation in a seaso...

The aim of this study was to compare the number of inactivated-influenza vaccine-related spontaneous abortion and stillbirth (SB) reports in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database during three consecutive flu seasons beginning 2008/2009 and assess the relative fetal death reports associated with the two-vaccine 2009/2010 season. The VAERS database was searched for reports o...

We considered how participatory syndromic surveillance data can be used to estimate influenza attack rates during the 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 seasons in the United States. Our inference is based on assessing the difference in the rates of self-reported influenza-like illness (ILI, defined as presence of fever and cough/sore throat) among the survey participants during periods of active vs. low ...

BACKGROUND The 2008-09 influenza season was the time in which the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) utilized an electronic biosurveillance system for tracking and monitoring of influenza trends. The system, known as ESSENCE or Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics, was monitored for the influenza season as well as for a rise in influenza cases ...

BACKGROUND Illness-related absences have been shown to lead to negative educational and economic outcomes. Both hand washing and hand sanitizer interventions have been shown to be effective in reducing illness-related absences. However, while the importance of hand hygiene in schools is clear, the role of instruction in use is less obvious. The purpose of this study was to compare absenteeism r...

A little over a year ago, a damning report published in the journal Nature (1 ) sent a ripple through the public health and social science communities: in a season of unusually high flu outbreak, one of the world’s newest biosurveillance systems was inaccurately predicting flu trends. Google Flu Trends (GFT), launched in 2008, is an attempt by Google to predict, in real time, the prevalence of ...