BACKGROUND Two proven nosocomial cases of Legionella pneumonia occurred at the Wesley Hospital (Brisbane, Australia) in May 2013. To trace the epidemiology of these cases, whole genome sequence analysis was performed on Legionella pneumophila isolates from the infected patients, prospective isolates collected from the hospital water distribution system (WDS), and retrospective patient isolates ...

BACKGROUND Should an emerging infectious disease outbreak or an environmental disaster occur, the collection of epidemiological data must start as soon as possible after the event's onset. Questionnaires are usually built de novo for each event, resulting in substantially delayed epidemiological responses that are detrimental to the understanding and control of the event considered. Moreover, t...

Background: The analysis of epidemiological data at an early phase situation, when the confident correlation contributing factors to outcome has not yet been established, may present a challenge for conventional methods analysis. Objective: This study aimed develop approaches that can be effective in areas with less labeled data. Methods: An combined dataset statistics national and subnational ...

background and objective: streptococcosis/lactococcosis is the cause of high morbidity and mortality in aquaculture sector and to date a number of species of streptococcus and lactococcus genera including s. iniae, s. agalactiae, s. dysagalactiae, s. parauberis, s. feacalis, l. garvieae and l. lactis have been discriminated as the cause of disease in aquatic animals. despite the use of diagnost...

Bacterial immunoglobulin-binding proteins expressed on the surface of group A streptococci represent a heterogeneous family of functionally related proteins. In this report, we describe efficient methods for extracting immunoglobulin-binding proteins and classifying them functionally and antigenically. A common characteristic of immunoglobulin-binding proteins expressed by group A streptococci ...

Avian influenza has become a serious concern from both veterinary and public health points of view. National and international organisations, veterinary health authorities, research institutions, diagnostic laboratories and field services make enormous efforts worldwide to detect, combat and prevent this important disease. Accordingly, the standard diagnostic protocols are being supported by a ...

background: this study was carried out in opi-agu a tropical semi-urban autonomous community comprising of three villages in enugu state, nigeria, between the months of april and june 2010. it was designed to determine the prevalence of onchocerca volvulus infection and assess the perception of the disease among the inhabitants of this community. methods: a total number of 305 individuals compr...

The paper shows the outlines of the SLAM system, that allows for an effective use of Formal Methods (FM) in Rapid Application Development (RAD) and other prototyping processes. The SLAM system, includes an expressive object oriented specification language and a development environment that, among other features, is able to generate efficient and readable code in a high level object oriented lan...

avian influenza virus (aiv) infection is a major cause of bird or human mortality and morbidity, therefore the rapid identification of the virus is of important clinical and epidemiological implication. methods: a multiplex reverse transcriptase pcr (rt-pcr) was optimized for the detection of influenza a virus and the h5 and h9 subtypes. the influenza type a specific primers were directed to th...