Little information is available in the United States regarding the incidence and distribution of diseases caused by critical microbiologic agents with the potential for use in acts of terrorism. We describe disease-specific, demographic, geographic, and seasonal distribution of selected bioterrorism-related conditions (anthrax, botulism, brucellosis, cholera, plague, tularemia, and viral enceph...

Two common means of controlling infectious diseases are screening and contact tracing. Which should be used, and when? We consider the problem of determining the cheapest mix of screening and contact tracing necessary to achieve a desired endemic prevalence of a disease or to identify a specified number of cases. We perform a partial equilibrium analysis of small-scale interventions, assuming t...

Believed to be all but absent from United States, the Leishmania parasite has infected more than 1000 hunting dogs in 21 U.S. states and the Canadian province of Ontario. Nobody is claiming that the disease is about to run riot among the U.S. population. But the widespread outbreak in dogs has experts wondering whether visceral leishmaniasis--which sickens over half a million people yearly in S...

In Europe most authors consider that histoplasmosis due to Histoplasma capsulatum is a rare imported fungal disease that is only diagnosed when it appears in the disseminated form. Such a presentation is very unusual in areas where it is endemic.' This paradox is explicable because in most cases infection is localised, so that in endemic areas cases of dissemination represent a very small propo...

Ardabil Province, northwestern Iran, is endemic for visceral leishmaniasis of Mediterranean type from many years ago. This situation might cause to underestimate other important diseases, which occur sporadically within the same area. In this case, a 6-year-old male patient in this area was treated as infected with visceral leishmaniasis initially with seropositive result for visceral leishmani...

Infectious diseases affect millions of people every year. In fact, more than 17 million deaths worldwide each year are attributed to infectious diseases [6]. An endemic disease is a disease which persists over time in a given population or geographic region [4]. For example, prior to the development of the measles vaccine in the 1960’s and eradication of measles from the United States in 2000, ...