The national notification data from 1952 to 1997 was examined in order to characterise hepatitis A virus (HAV) infection in Australia in the 1990s, and to determine whether currently available surveillance data are sufficient to inform disease control strategies and vaccination policies. Hepatitis A annual notification rates declined dramatically from a high of 123 notifications per 100,000 per...

A study was undertaken to analyse legionellosis notifications for the period 1991 to 2000 to establish the distribution of legionellosis in Australia with the aim of identifying risk factors amenable to public health intervention. Legionellosis notification rates ranged from 0.6 cases per 100,000 population in 1991 to 2.5 cases per 100,000 population in 2000. Notifications were highest in autum...

According to the latest United Nations estimations, people with dementia worldwide will increase to over 100 million by 2050 [1]. This is significant not only due to the number of people affected by such disease, but also by the number of people required to care for those patients. The overall objective of our work is to study how ambient intelligent technologies can assist the elder’s caregive...

In Hong Kong, there are more than 7000 notified cases of tuberculosis (TB) each year. Ambulatory chemotherapy has been the mainstay of anti-TB treatment. The majority of notified TB cases are managed in the chest clinics of the Tuberculosis & Chest Service (TB&CS) under the administration of the Department of Health (DH). Others are treated at various medical units of the Hospital Authority and...

BACKGROUND Legionnaires' disease is a severe form of pneumonia, and although public health medical inspectors must be notified, it is often under-reported. The objectives of this study were to determine the completeness rate of notification of Legionnaires' disease and to estimate the incidence of this disease in Wallonia, the southern part of Belgium, in 2012. METHOD This retrospective, tran...

INTRODUCTION Singapore's defense against imported novel influenza A (H1N1-2009) comprised public health measures in compliance with the World Health Organization's (WHO) International Health Regulations (IHR), 2005. We report herein on the epidemiology and control of the fi rst 350 cases notified between May and June 2009. MATERIALS AND METHODS We investigated the fi rst 350 laboratory-confir...

OBJECTIVE To assess the completeness of data describing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander status in NSW invasive meningococcal disease notifications and determine the relative risk for invasive meningococcal disease among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in NSW. METHODS Surveillance data from the NSW Notifiable Diseases Database was reviewed for 5-year periods between 1991 an...

SETTING National Tuberculosis Program, Department of Public Health, Ministry of Health, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). OBJECTIVE To summarize data on the incidence of tuberculosis and associated risk factors for cases reported during 2010-2011. DESIGN Retrospective analysis of routinely collected data through an established national disease notification system of the Ministry of Health in K...

BACKGROUND Tuberculosis (TB) is the leading cause of death in South Africa. The burden of disease varies by age, with peaks in TB notification rates in the HIV-negative population at ages 0-5, 20-24, and 45-49 years. There is little variation between age groups in the rates in the HIV-positive population. The drivers of this age pattern remain unknown. METHODS We developed an age-structured s...

Disease outbreak detection, monitoring and notification systems are increasingly gaining popularity since these systems are designed to assess threats to public health and disease outbreaks are becoming increasingly common world-wide. A variety of systems are in use around the world, with coverage of national, international and global disease outbreaks. These systems use different taxonomies an...