Endemic trachoma continues to exist in remote Aboriginal communities in Australia. The National Trachoma Surveillance and Reporting Unit, established in 2006, is responsible for the collation, analysis and reporting of trachoma prevalence data and the documentation of trachoma control strategies in Australia. Data were collected from Aboriginal communities designated at-risk for endemic trachom...

Host species switches by bacterial pathogens leading to new endemic infections are important evolutionary events that are difficult to reconstruct over the long term. We investigated the host switching of Staphylococcus aureus over a long evolutionary timeframe by developing Bayesian phylogenetic methods to account for uncertainty about past host associations and using estimates of evolutionary...

BACKGROUND Norovirus is a leading cause of gastroenteritis episodes and outbreaks in US military deployments, but estimates of endemic disease burden among military personnel in garrison are lacking. METHODS Diagnostic codes from gastroenteritis-associated medical encounters of active duty military personnel and their beneficiaries from July 1998-June 2011 were obtained from the Armed Forces ...

In the UK, recent mean temperatures have consistently increased by between 1°C and 4°C compared to the 30-year monthly averages. Furthermore, all available predictive models for the UK indicate that the climate is likely to change further and feature more extreme weather events and a trend towards wetter, milder winters and hotter, drier summers. These changes will alter the prevalence of endem...

The objective of this study, based on a systematic literature review, is to present the characteristics and potentialities of remote sensing as a useful environmental surveillance tool for applied research in the control of endemics in Brazil. Onboard satellite sensors allow for monitoring the territory, furnishing spatial and temporal information on various scales and regions in the electromag...

This is a descriptive, exploratory study correlating ML Flow, bacilloscopy and classification of paucibacillary (PB) and multibacillary (MB), involving 1,041 new leprosy cases in 13 municipalities of Minas Gerais State, from October 2002 to March 2004. Agreement between ML Flow and the classification of the number of skin lesions and bacilloscopy was moderate (K:0.51 and K:0.48, respectively); ...

Despite the extensive implementation of multiple drug therapy (MDT) in most leprosy-endemic countries world-wide since 1982, bringing about a remarkable reduction in prevalence, there are still regions at the sub-national level where the implementation of MDT remains difficult. The state of Bihar (population 86.3 million) in India is a good example of such a region. Previously rated as one of t...