BACKGROUND Countries face conflicting incentives to report infectious disease outbreaks. Reports of outbreaks can prompt other countries to impose trade and travel restrictions, which has the potential to discourage reporting. However, reports can also bring medical assistance to contain the outbreak, including access to vaccines. METHODS We compiled data on reports of meningococcal meningiti...

0173 For disease outbreak detection, the public-health community has historically relied on the watchful eyes of doctors and other health-care workers, who have reported individual cases or clusters of cases of particular diseases to healthcare and other authorities. The increased availability of electronic health-care data, however, raises the possibility of more automated and earlier outbreak...

Conducting research in an emergency situation, such as an outbreak of disease, poses ethical challenges. These challenges differ according to the type of research: epidemiologic or clinical, and for the latter, whether the disease outbreak can be anticipated in advance. We address these three situations, proposing different potential solutions for each. In an outbreak situation, public health a...

Outbreaks are both a demonstration of a breakdown or failure in the system and, by acting as a ‘natural experiment’, present an opportunity to provide new insights into disease transmission and, perhaps, improvements to the system. This chapter outlines in detail the surveillance systems in Sweden and the US that are designed to detect waterborne disease outbreaks, and examines the actions take...

Early, reliable detection of disease outbreaks is a critical problem today. This paper reports an investigation of the use of causal Bayesian networks to model spatio-temporal patterns of a non-contagious disease (respiratory anthrax infection) in a population of people. The number of parameters in such a network can become enormous, if not carefully managed. Also, inference needs to be perform...

Abstract Food- or waterborne diseases in long-term care facilities (LTCF) can result in serious outcomes, including deaths, and they are potentially preventable. We analyzed data collected by OzFoodNet on food- and waterborne disease outbreaks occurring in LTCF in Australia from 2001 to 2008. We compared outbreaks by the number of persons affected, etiology, and implicated vehicle. During 8 yea...

ncreasing trade liberalisation, globalisation and international transportation of people and commodities have increased the potential for disease incursion, both plant and animal, in countries like Australia. While a comparatively strict quarantine regime and geographic isolation provide substantial protection in Australia, disease incursions are not uncommon. In recent years, there have been s...

Enteric infections Outbreaks of foodborne disease Four outbreaks of gastrointestinal disease thought to be due to consumption of contaminated food were reported in September and October 2011. Three outbreaks were identified through complaints to the NSW Food Authority (NSWFA) and one outbreak was identified through reports to a public health unit. For one of these outbreaks, the causative organ...