The annual influenza vaccine is one of the most common public health interventions and is universally recommended for all individuals older than six months. Vaccine composition depends on viruses circulating over the past flu season and are estimated to be the most prevalent and representative strains in the current season. Here, we use clinical data outfitted with viral genetics to characteriz...

Epidemiological modeling for infectious disease is important for disease management and its routine implementation needs to be facilitated through better description of models in an operational context. A standardized model characterization process that allows selection or making manual comparisons of available models and their results is currently lacking. A key need is a universal framework t...

Electronic event-based biosurveillance systems (EEBS's) that use near real-time information from the internet are an increasingly important source of epidemiologic intelligence. However, there has not been a systematic assessment of EEBS evaluations, which could identify key uncertainties about current systems and guide EEBS development to most effectively exploit web-based information for bios...

A general problem in biosurveillance is finding the optimal aggregates of more basic data to monitor for the detection of disease outbreaks. We developed a multivariate procedure for identifying the set of over-the-counter (OTC) healthcare products that correlates best with a set of diagnoses. To ensure that the procedure produces results that agree with clinical knowledge of diseases and (OTC)...