DON, a trichothecene toxin produced by Fusarium graminearum, is postulated to have a role in pathogenesis in Fusarium head blight of barley and wheat. To understand possible roles of DON, we investigated effects of the toxin in healthy tissues. Portions of epidermis were removed from 1.1 cm barley leaf segments and the segments floated with exposed mesophyll cells in contact with DON solutions....

Health forecasting forewarns the health community about future health situations and disease episodes so that health systems can better allocate resources and manage demand. The tools used for developing and measuring the accuracy and validity of health forecasts commonly are not defined although they are usually adapted forms of statistical procedures. This review identifies previous typologie...

Epidemiology researchers based at PA, OH, IN, ND, and SD land grant universities are collaborating to provide growers and agricultural industry with timely and reliable disease forecasts for Fusarium head blight (FHB). Knowledge about sources of inoculum, inoculum levels, and weather conditions favorable for FHB development is crucial in devising a handy and reliable disease forecaster. The eff...

We conducted an expert survey of leprosy (Hansen's Disease) and neglected tropical disease experts in February 2016. Experts were asked to forecast the next year of reported cases for the world, for the top three countries, and for selected states and territories of India. A total of 103 respondents answered at least one forecasting question. We elicited lower and upper confidence bounds. Compa...

BACKGROUND Much of the developing world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, exhibits high levels of morbidity and mortality associated with diarrhea, acute respiratory infection, and malaria. With the increasing awareness that the aforementioned infectious diseases impose an enormous burden on developing countries, public health programs therein could benefit from parsimonious general-purpose for...

artificial intelligence (ai) techniques offer powerful objective algorithms foranalysis of multimodal and high-dimensional data. recently, these techniques havebecome a reliable tool in the medical domain. this paper describes an efficienttechnique for building an application that is capable of forecasting and classifyinghealthcare information using machine learning as a subfield of ai methods....

In recent years social and news media have increasingly been used to explain patterns in disease activity and progression. Social media data, principally from the Twitter network, has been shown to correlate well with official disease case counts. This fact has been exploited to provide advance warning of outbreak detection, forecasting of disease levels and the ability to predict the likelihoo...

Infectious disease outbreaks recapitulate biology: they emerge from the multi-level interaction of hosts, pathogens, and their shared environment. As a result, predicting when, where, and how far diseases will spread requires a complex systems approach to modeling. Recent studies have demonstrated that predicting different components of outbreaks–e.g., the expected number of cases, pace and tem...

Mathematical models have been powerful tools in developing mechanistic understanding of infectious diseases. Furthermore, they have allowed detailed forecasting of epidemiological phenomena such as outbreak size, which is of considerable public-health relevance. The short generation time of pathogens and the strong selection they are subjected to (by host immunity, vaccines, chemotherapy, etc.)...