The field of structural heart disease (SHD) intervention has grown rapidly over the past several years. While training program content, standards, credentialing, and board examinations for percutaneous coronary intervention have matured and become well developed, no such structure exists in the field of SHD. Recognition of the need for training program standards and SHD curriculum stimulated th...

PROBLEM The Pacific region has widely dispersed populations, limited financial and human resources and a high burden of disease. There is an urgent need to improve the availability, reliability and timeliness of useable health data. CONTEXT The purpose of this paper is to share lessons learnt from a three-year pilot field epidemiology training programme that was designed to respond to these P...

BACKGROUND Given that many infectious diseases spread rapidly, across borders and species, there is a growing worldwide need to increase the number of public health professionals skilled in controlling infectious epidemics. Needed also are more public health professionals skilled in non-communicable disease surveillance and interventions. As a result, we surveyed all 57 field epidemiology train...

Both authors were introduced to infectious disease epidemiology by Alexander D. Langmuir, and he taught us the principles of this field by example. We came to the Communicable Disease Center (now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)) directly out of clinical training with absolutely no formal training in public health or epidemiology. Perhaps this was a fortunate happenstance; i...

Cervical cancer incidence and mortality rates are high, particularly in developing countries. Most cervical cancers can be prevented by human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination, screening, and timely treatment. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides global technical assistance for implementation and evaluation of HPV vaccination pilot projects and programs and laboratory...

The Ebola virus disease outbreak that initially hit Guinea, Liberia and Senegal in 2014 was projected to affect Nigeria very badly when the first case was reported in July 2014. However, the outbreak was effectively and swiftly contained with only eight deaths out of 20 cases, confounding even the most optimistic predictions of the disease modelers. A combination of health worker and public edu...

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In addition to my advisor and mentor, Professor R. William Field, I thank the other members of my thesis committee, Professor James A. Merchant and Professor Charles F. Lynch for their assistance and also for their insight. I also would like to thank Professor Charles Platz for his contributions to the development of this study, as well as his expertise which made this study ...

Celebrating the new year with fireworks is traditional in Italy. A national surveillance system maintained by police indicated that on New Year's Eve 1992, more than 1100 fireworks-related injuries and four deaths occurred in Italy (Ministry of the Interior, unpublished data, 1993). In many areas of the country, the use of fireworks begins several weeks before the new year and continues through...

Skin diseases are the leading cause of morbidity in children. As children spend most their time schools, training teachers on detection skin changes and timely referral will prevent or reduce complications. Hence, we propose a quasi-experimental study to evaluate effectiveness for early identification disorders among primary school rural area southern India. The government government-aided scho...