This review reports correlations between four independent fields related to inflammation and Alzheimer disease: fundamental pathology, epidemiology, transgenic animal studies and clinical trials. Activated microglia, along with a spectrum of inflammatory mediators, have been identified in association with the lesions of Alzheimer disease (AD), suggesting that antiinflammatory agents such as NSA...

BACKGROUND Advanced disease-surveillance systems have been deployed worldwide to provide early detection of infectious disease outbreaks and bioterrorist attacks. New methods that improve the overall detection capabilities of these systems can have a broad practical impact. Furthermore, most current generation surveillance systems are vulnerable to dramatic and unpredictable shifts in the healt...

To assess the impacts of various interventions on epidemic dynamics, the authors propose an integrated epidemiological simulation framework called Multilayer Epidemic Dynamics Simulator (MEDSim), which combines four contact structures: within age group, between age groups, daily commute, and nationwide interaction. We use the daily commuting network to simulate outbreak locations and interventi...

In a model for bacterial infections with various mutants we find the epidemiological system evolving towards criticality without outer tuning of a control parameter. This is an indication for self-organized criticality. The epidemic model is a susceptible–infected–recovered hosts system (SIR) for the harmless agent infecting hosts I , acting as a background to a mutant strain Y which occasional...

We revisit the non-bilinear incidence rate model proposed by Severo, in order to introduce a derived dynamical model taking into account the heterogeneities related to environment, immunity and genetics. The properties of that model can be better understood by the means of the population dynamics theory.

The concept of epidemiological intelligence, as a construction of information societies, goes beyond monitoring a list of diseases and the ability to elicit rapid responses. The concept should consider the complexity of the definition of epidemiology in the identification of this object of study without being limited to a set of actions in a single government sector. The activities of epidemiol...

This paper presents a model of the co-evolution of transmissible disease and a population of non-randomly mixed susceptible agents. The presence of the disease elements is shown to prevent the onset of genetic convergence of the agent population. The epidemiological model also acts in a distributed fashion to counter the tendency of the agent population to occupy spatially closeknit communities...

OBJECTIVES To propose an alternative procedure, based on a Bayesian network (BN), for estimation and prediction, and to discuss its usefulness for taking into account the hierarchical relationships among covariates. METHODS The procedure is illustrated by modeling the risk of diarrhea infection for 2,740 children aged 0 to 59 months in Cameroon. We compare the procedure with a standard logist...

Introduction Epidemiological modeling for infectious disease is useful for disease management and routine implementation needs to be facilitated through better description of models in an operational context. A standardized model characterization process that allows selection or making manual comparisons of available models and their results is currently lacking. Los Alamos National Laboratory ...

Public health agencies traditionally rely heavily on epidemiological reporting for notifiable disease control, but increasingly apply simulation models for forecasting and to understand intervention tradeoffs. Unfortunately, such models traditionally lack capacity to easily incorporate information from epidemiological data feeds. Here, we introduce particle filtering and demonstrate how this ap...