Noroviruses (NoVs) are the leading cause of gastroenteritis outbreaks in humans worldwide. Since late 2012, a new GII.4 variant Sydney 2012 has caused a significant increase in NoV epidemics in several countries. From November of 2012 to January of 2013, three gastroenteritis outbreaks occurred in two social welfare homes (Outbreaks A and B) and a factory (Outbreak C) in Shenzhen city of China....

In this paper we introduce a new spatio-temporal methodology for biosurveillance entitled the Repeated Two-sample Rank (RTR) procedure. It is designed to sequentially incorporate information from individual observations and thus can operate on data in real-time as it arrives into an automated biosurveillance system. In addition, upon a signal of a possible outbreak, the methodology suggests a w...

An outbreak of Acinetobacter spp infection in the neonatal unit at Lok Nayak Hospital, New Delhi, India, is described. During a 6-month period, 68 strains of Acinetobacter baumannii were isolated from the blood and CSF of 47 neonates admitted to the intensive care unit. Diagnosis of clinically significant bacteremia was made in 36 patients. On environmental/personnel sampling, Acinetobacter spp...

Streptococcus pneumoniae is a common cause of community acquired pneumonia (CAP). Influenza infection increases susceptibility to S. pneumoniae infection in adults but this link is less well described in children. We report on an outbreak of CAP affecting 25 previously well adolescents in a New South Wales boarding school. S. pneumoniae 1 was confirmed in two cases. During this period, the scho...

introduction: serratia marcescens is a serious death-causing factor especially for premature and low birth weighted neonates, and has become an important cause of nosocomial infection over the last years. it is a motile, non-sporulating gram-negative bacillus classified in the family enterobacteriacea. this group of bacteria affect on immune system mainly in newborns.  in this report, we descri...

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...

background : few studies have focused on syndromic data to determine levels of alarm thresholds to detection of meningitis outbreaks. the purpose of this study was to determine threshold levels of meningitis outbreak in hamadan province, west of iran . methods : data on both confirmed and suspected cases of meningitis (fever and neurological symptom) form 21 march 2010 to 20 march 2012 were use...

food safety issues are not a new issue in science, but due to the dynamic changes in the modern world it is as equally important as decades ago. the aim of the study was to address the efforts in the development of a comprehensive food safety system in serbia, and make specific recommendations regarding the improvement of epidemiological investigation capacity as a useful tool which contributes...

Emerging infectious diseases and the growth of information technology have produced new demands and possibilities for disease surveillance and response. Increasing numbers of outbreak reports must be assessed rapidly so that control efforts can be initiated and unsubstantiated reports can be identified to protect countries from unnecessary economic damage. The World Health Organization has set ...