Introduction Development of new methods for the rapid detection of emerging disease outbreaks is a research priority in the field of biosurveillance. Because real-world data are often proprietary in nature, scientists must utilize synthetic data generation methods to evaluate new detection methodologies. Colizza et. al. have shown that epidemic spread is dependent on the airline transportation ...

yndromic surveillance, a medical surveillance approach that bins data into broadly defi ned syndrome groups, has drawn increasing interest in recent years for the early detection of disease outbreaks for both public health and bioterrorism defense. Emergency department chief complaint records are an attractive data source for syndromic surveillance owing to their timeliness and ready availabili...

Mycoplasma gallisepticum (MG) is a persistent, highly transmissible chicken and turkey pathogen. Infections of the organism can yield significant losses in performance and associated economics to all sectors of the poultry industry. In this paper, potential and realized effects of MG on the poultry industry are discussed along with currently available and developing control methods. Available m...

SpeciaL FocuS editoriaL 740 Virulence Volume 4 issue 8 This special issue of Virulence is concerned with new trends and developments in biodefense research with emphasis in bacterial pathogens and toxins. Although the wealth of research approaches targeting this elite class of pathogens is increasing, there is an apparent gap in translating the accumulated information into effective medical cou...

The recent series of anthrax attacks has reinforced the importance of biosurveillance systems for the timely detection of epidemics. This paper describes a statistical framework for monitoring grocery data to detect a large-scale but localized bioterrorism attack. Our system illustrates the potential of data sources that may be more timely than traditional medical and public health data. The sy...

Objective Pacific Northwest National Laboratory hosted an intern-based web application development contest in the summer of 2016 centered around developing novel chemical surveillance applications to aid in health situational awareness. Making up the three teams were three graduate students (n=9) from various US schools majoring in nonpublic health domains, such as computer sicence and user des...