Effective biosecurity is necessary to protect nations and their citizens from a variety of threats, including emerging infectious diseases, agricultural or environmental pests and pathogens, and illegal wildlife trade. The physical pathways by which these threats are transported internationally, predominantly shipping and air traffic, have undergone significant growth and changes in spatial dis...

Recent epidemics and pandemics have highlighted a number of ethical concerns about the response to the increasing threat of emerging infectious diseases. Some of these ethical concerns are very fundamental. They include why a pandemic was declared, how much clinical information can be collected for public health without threatening patient confidentiality and how to ensure fairness in the distr...

1 Scientific Institute of Public Health, Directorate Public Health and Surveillance, Brussels, Belgium 2 KU Leuven, UZ Gasthuisberg, Department of Medical Diagnostic Sciences, Laboratory of Medical Microbiology, Leuven, Belgium 3 Scientific Institute of Public Health, Directorate Communicable and Infectious Diseases, Brussels, Belgium [email protected] Influenza surveillance in children:...

The Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System (AFHSC-GEIS) has the mission of performing surveillance for emerging infectious diseases that could affect the United States (U.S.) military. This mission is accomplished by orchestrating a global portfolio of surveillance projects, capacity-building efforts, outbreak investigations and trai...

The session focused upon several issues raised by Mr Anand Sinha in the context of both advanced and emerging market economies (EMEs). Keeping in view, broader interlinkages between the financial sector and the real sector, the need for better coordination between financial regulation and macroeconomic policies for sustaining growth was emphasized. Given the nature and origin of the recent cris...

While newly available electronic transmission methods can increase timeliness and completeness of infectious disease reports, limitations of this technology may unintentionally compromise detection of, and response to, bioterrorism and other outbreaks. We reviewed implementation experiences for five electronic laboratory systems and identified problems with data transmission, sensitivity, speci...

Hava Yilmaz; Vedat Turhan; Kadriye Kart Yasar; Mustafa Hatipoglu; Mustafa Sunbul Prof; Hakan Leblebicioglu, Prof; Infectious Diseases, Ondokuz Mayis University, Samsun, Turkey; Gata Haydarpasa Training Hospital, Infectious Disease and Clinical Microbiology Deparment, Istanbul, Turkey; Infectious Diseases, Bakirkoy Sadi Konuk Training and Research Hospital, Istanbul, Turkey; Infectious Diseases,...

24 As many emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases are associated with food 25 animals, the relationship between available healthy food sources and population 26 health and social stability has become evident. A recent example of the importance of 27 this relationship was observed during the current flu pandemic. This recent pandemic 28 brought attention to novel target groups of susceptib...

Infectious diseases spreading in a human population occasionally exhibit sudden transitions in their qualitative dynamics. Previous work has successfully predicted such transitions in New York City's historical measles incidence using the seasonally forced susceptible-infectious-recovered (SIR) model. This work relied on a dataset spanning 45 years (1928-1973), which we have extended to 93 year...