To gain understanding of surveillance and epidemiology of viral gastroenteritis outbreaks in Europe, we compiled data from 10 surveillance systems in the Foodborne Viruses in Europe network. Established surveillance systems found Norovirus to be responsible for >85% (N =3,714) of all nonbacterial outbreaks of gastroenteritis reported from 1995 to 2000. However, the absolute number and populatio...

The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games will be one of the largest mass gathering events in British history. In order to minimise potential infectious disease threats related to the event, the Health Protection Agency (HPA) has set up a suite of robust and multisource surveillance systems. These include enhancements of already established systems (notification of infectious diseases, local...

Introduction Syndromic surveillance is an alternative type of public health surveillance which utilises pre-diagnostic data sources to detect outbreaks earlier than conventional (laboratory) surveillance and monitor the progression of illnesses in populations. These systems are often noted for their ability to detect a wider range of cases in underreported illnesses, utilise existing data sourc...

INTRODUCTION Effective disease surveillance is vital for a successful disaster response. This study assessed the functionality of the three disease surveillance systems used post-Haiyan: Philippine Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (PIDSR), Event-based Surveillance and Response (ESR) and Surveillance in Post Extreme Emergencies and Disasters (SPEED). METHODS A survey of 45 governme...

Though it has been a focus of the country's public health surveillance systems since the 1950s, schistosomiasis represents an ongoing public health challenge in China. Parallel, schistosomiasis-specific surveillance systems have been essential to China's decades-long campaign to reduce the prevalence of the disease, and have contributed to the successful elimination in five of China's twelve hi...

Having information about preexisting chronic diseases and available public health assets is critical to ensuring an adequate public health response to natural disasters and acts of terrorism. We describe a method to derive this information using a combination of data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and geographic information systems (GIS) technology. Our demonstration focuse...

In the 1966s visionary film 'Fantastic Voyage' a submarine crew was shrunk to 100 nm in size and injected into the body of an injured scientist to repair his damaged brain. The movie (written by Harry Kleiner; directed by Richard Fleischer; novel by Isaac Asimov) drew attention to the potential power of engineered nanoscale structures and devices to construct, monitor, control, treat, and repai...

This paper outlines a recently developed COTS system for sonar surveillance applications. It uses an open architecture and commercial operating system, together with programmable DSP cards, to realise a compact unit that has been deployed in a number of operational sonar applications. The system can be configured by the operator for a variety of surveillance and classification processing tasks ...