background pandemic flu is a concerning problem with potentially high mortality and morbidity rates, so needs a proper health system response in each country. objectives to evaluate the nationwide health system response in iran after declaration of h1n1/swine flu pandemic in june 2009. patients and methods a surveillance system in all regions of country was implemented upon declaration of pande...

genomic signal processing is a relatively new field in bioinformatics, in which signal processing algorithms and methods are used to study functional structures in the dna. an appropriate mapping of the dna sequence into one or more numerical sequences enables the use of many digital signal processing tools in the analysis of different genomic sequences. also, a novel influenza a (h1n1) virus o...

Two articles published recently in PLoS Medicine highlight the problem of how to effectively share information in the wake of a rapidly spreading disease, and prompted us to ask the question ''How well are journals doing?'' with regard to this important goal. The answer, sadly, seems to be ''not well enough.'' Although the potential of the Internet for improving the dissemination of information...

Traditionally, national security has been narrowly defined as the preservation of the state from physical threats. Still, emerging diseases and their pandemic potential pose perhaps an even greater national security threat, particularly in this era of globalization when disease can spread more rapidly than in previous eras. Thirty four percent of all deaths worldwide are now attributable to inf...

Along with continual enhancement of current influenza surveillance programs, pandemic preparedness also involves application of current surveillance techniques to past pandemics to identify their viruses and patterns, as well as estimation of the potential burden of future pandemics. Although mortality surveillance has been in place in selected locations for more than a century, the recent deve...

Focusing on pandemic influenza, this chapter approaches the planning for and response to such a major worldwide health event as a complex engineering systems problem. Action-oriented analysis of pandemics requires a broad inclusion of academic disciplines since no one domain can cover a significant fraction of the problem. Numerous research papers and action plans have treated pandemics as pure...

A pandemic is defined as an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting large number of people. Pandemics have occurred throughout human history appear to be increasing because rising emergence viral diseases from animals (zoonoses). The risk arises the combined effects Spark Risk (e.g. bushmeat hunting) Spread mode transmissio...

Previous influenza pandemics are usually invoked in pandemic preparedness planning without a thorough analysis of the events surrounding them, what has been called the 'configuration' of epidemics. Historic pandemics are instead used to contrast them to the novelty of the coming imagined plague or as fear of a ghost-like repetition of the past. This view of pandemics is guided by a biomedical f...

Influenza pandemics have been amongst the largest and the deadliest epidemics in the history of man, and were observed already in ancient times. For example, records from the fifth century B.C. suggest that influenza pandemics were observed in ancient Greece. In Europe, during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, numerous concordant reports from different countries describe epidemics of respira...