Twenty-five thousand fans crowd a park in New York City to hear a popular rock group give an outdoor summer concert. In all the noise and fun nobody notices two men driving a pickup truck bearing official city markings around the periphery of the park. Mounted on the back of the truck, a fog machine sprays a steady stream of thin vapor into the air. The people in the park have just been exposed...

To the editor: Starbuck et al. have identified a significant gap in any future global response to a severe influenza pandemic. The threat of inadequate preparedness and limited public health responses in low-resource settings, leading to uncontrolled transmission is a real and unwelcome possibility during a pandemic. The authors recommend that detailed authoritative guidance should be developed...

facilitate rapid detection of a future bioterrorist attack, an increasing number of public health departments are investing in new surveillance systems that target the early manifestations of bioterrorism-related disease. Whether this approach is likely to detect an epidemic sooner than reporting by alert clinicians remains unknown. The detection of a bioterrorism-related epidemic will depend o...

Objectives For earlier detection of infectious disease outbreaks, a digital syndromic surveillance system based on search queries or social media should be utilized. By using real-time data sources, a digital syndromic surveillance system can overcome the limitation of time-delay in traditional surveillance systems. Here, we introduce an approach to develop such a digital surveillance system. ...