Elderly often combine several risk factors that influence the course and severity of an influenza infection. The World Health Organization strongly recommends vaccination of elderly living in care facilities. Even if vaccine effectiveness seems to decline with age (1), several studies (2-3) show that vaccination reduces the risk for pneumonia, hospitalisation and death during an influenza epide...

Influenza-like illnesses (ILIs) are caused by several respiratory pathogens. These pathogens show weak to strong seasonal activity implying seasonality in ILI consultations. In this paper, the contribution of pathogens to seasonality of ILI consultations was statistically modelled. Virological count data were first smoothed using modulation models for seasonal time series. Second, Poisson regre...

Epidemic outbreak detection is an important problem in public health and the development of reliable methods for outbreak detection remains an active research area. In this paper we introduce a Bayesian method to detect outbreaks of influenza-like illness from surveillance data. The rationale is that, during the early phase of the outbreak, surveillance data changes from autoregressive dynamics...

Monitoring sales of medications is a potential candidate for an early signal of a seasonal influenza epidemic. To test this theory, the data from a traditional, consultation-oriented influenza surveillance system were compared to medication sales and a predictive model was developed. Weekly influenza-like incidence rates from the National Influenza Sentinel Surveillance System were compared to ...

Human parechoviruses (HPeV), previously designated as echovirus 22 and 23, belong to the Parechovirus genus within the Picornaviridae family and has been designated HPeV 1 and 2 respectively.1 The HPeV genome organization and disease spectrum are similar to other viruses in the Picornaviridae family. HPeV have been frequently associated with respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases in children...

Introduction The North Dakota Department of Health (NDDoH) collects outpatient ILI data through North Dakota Influenza-like Illness Network (ND ILINet), providing situational awareness regarding the percent of visits for ILI at sentinel sites across the state. Because of increased clinic staff time devoted to electronic health initiatives and an expanding population, we have found sentinel site...

Although current national response plans assume that most influenza-infected patients would stay home during a pandemic, surveillance systems might be overwhelmed and unable to monitor their health status. We explored the feasibility of using a nationwide telephone survey to monitor at-home patients. Of randomly selected adults surveyed during low influenza activity months (April-October 2006, ...

Human parechoviruses (HPeV), previously designated as echovirus 22 and 23, belong to the Parechovirus genus within the Picornaviridae family and has been designated HPeV 1 and 2 respectively.1 The HPeV genome organization and disease spectrum are similar to other viruses in the Picornaviridae family. HPeV have been frequently associated with respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases in children...

Increasing biosurveillance capacity is a public health priority in both the developed and the developing world. Effective syndromic surveillance is especially important if we are to successfully identify and monitor disease outbreaks in their early stages. This paper describes the construction and preliminary evaluation of a syndromic surveillance orientated application ontology designed to fac...

and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.