Syndrome surveillance

Acute febrile illness (AFI) is a broad clinical syndrome with a wide range of potential infectious etiologies. The lack of accessible, standardized approaches to conducting AFI etiologic investigations has contributed to significant global gaps in data on the epidemiology of AFI. Based on lessons learned from years of supporting AFI sentinel surveillance worldwide, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed the toolkit for planning and implementing AFI surveillance, described here. This toolkit provides a comprehensive yet flexible framework to guide researchers, public health officials, and other implementers in developing a strategy to identify and/or monitor the potential causes of AFI...

Unprecedented heat waves can affect all persons, but some are more sensitive to the effects of heat, including children and adults with underlying health conditions, pregnant women, and outdoor workers. Many regions of the United States experienced record-breaking high temperatures in 2023, with populations exposed to extremely high temperatures for prolonged periods. CDC examined emergency department (ED) visits associated with heat-related illness (HRI) from the National Syndromic Surveillance Program and compared daily HRI ED visit rates during the warm-season months (May-September) of 2023 with those during 2018-2022...

Autosomal dominant hereditary paraganglioma-pheochromocytoma syndrome (HPPS) is a rare genetic disorder characterized by neuroendocrine tumor development associated with pathogenic variants in succinate dehydrogenase (SDH) enzyme complex genes. Particularly, HPPS linked to SDHB mutation poses a significant clinical challenge due to its association with aggressive tumor features and a high risk of malignancy. Our report underscores the diversity in the presentation of patients with SDHB-mutated paraganglioma and the feasibility of managing it with a minimally invasive surgical approach...

BACKGROUND: Healthy Davis Together was a program launched in September 2020 in the city of Davis, California, to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and facilitate the return to normalcy. The program involved multiple interventions, including free saliva-based asymptomatic testing, targeted communication campaigns, education efforts, and distribution of personal protective equipment, community partnerships, and investments in the local economy. OBJECTIVE: This study identified demographic characteristics of individuals that underwent testing and assessed adherence to testing over time in a community pandemic-response program launched in a college town in California, United States...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread changes and disruptions to healthcare seeking behavior. There are limited studies on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare seeking patterns in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs), especially in settings with inequitable access to healthcare in rural and urban informal settlements. We investigated the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on reported healthcare seeking at health facilities and chemists using morbidity data from participants in an ongoing population-based infectious disease surveillance platform in Asembo in Siaya County, a rural setting in western Kenya and Kibera, an urban informal settlement in Nairobi County...

Purpose: Oncology clinicians are appropriately positioned to facilitate discussions of assisted reproductive technologies including preimplantation genetic testing for monogenic disease (PGT-M), in the context of cancer treatment or surveillance. Yet, reproductive services, including PGT-M, remain one of the least implemented services in oncology. No studies to date have explored which practice resources the clinicians need to increase knowledge of PGT-M. The objective of this study was to explore the specific needs of oncology clinicians to help maximize the reproductive potential of young adult patients with hereditary cancers...

Although epidemiological surveillance of COVID-19 has been gradually downgraded globally, the transmission of COVID-19 continues. It is critical to quantify the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 using multiple datasets including wastewater virus concentration data. Herein, we propose a comprehensive method for estimating the effective reproduction number using wastewater data. The wastewater virus concentration data, which were collected twice a week, were analyzed using daily COVID-19 incidence data obtained from Takamatsu, Japan between January 2022 and September 2022...

OBJECTIVE: To provide a summary of the noteworthy medical articles published in 2023 that are relevant to family physicians. SELECTING THE EVIDENCE: Articles were chosen and ranked by the PEER (Patients, Experience, Evidence, Research) team, a group of primary care health professionals focused on evidence-based medicine. The selection process involved routine surveillance of tables of contents in high-impact medical journals and continuous monitoring of EvidenceAlerts...

BACKGROUND: China is confronted with the significant menace posed by hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS). Nevertheless, the long-term spatial-temporal variations, regional prevalence patterns, and fundamental determinants' mechanisms for HFRS remain inadequately elucidated. METHODS: Newly diagnosed cases of HFRS from January 2004 to December 2019 were acquired from the China Public Health Science Data repository. We used Age-period-cohort and Bayesian Spacetime Hierarchy models to identify high-risk populations and regions in mainland China...

This case exhibits a presentation of multiple primary malignancies in a patient with Li-Fraumeni syndrome, necessitating surgical excision and multistaged reconstruction. Due to Li-Fraumeni syndrome patients' predisposition to developing malignancies, management includes lifelong surveillance and aggressive treatment of cancers. Plastic surgeons can minimize damage to patient's quality of life by carrying out reconstruction in a thoughtful manner that maximizes function and considers a potential lifetime of future reconstructive needs...

Streptococcus pyogenes, Group A Streptococcus (GAS), is a human pathogen that causes a spectrum of diseases from mild to severe, including GAS pharyngitis, a common acute respiratory disease in developed countries. Although wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has been extensively used to monitor viral pathogens such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, its applicability to S. pyogenes remains unexplored. This study was conducted to investigate the feasibility of detecting and quantifying S. pyogenes in wastewater by quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) and evaluate the applicability of WBE for monitoring the prevalence of GAS pharyngitis...

South Africa has the largest share of people living with HIV in the world and this population is ageing. The social context in which people seek HIV care is often ignored. Apart from clinical interventions, socio-behavioural factors impact successful HIV care outcomes for older adults living with HIV. We use cross-sectional data linked with demographic household surveillance data, consisting of HIV positive adults aged above 40, to identify socio-behavioural predictors of a detectable viral load. Older adults were more likely to have a detectable viral load if they did not disclose their HIV positive status to close family members (aOR 2...

BACKGROUND: Up to 41% of intra- and extra-adrenal paragangliomas are linked to germline mutations with autosomal dominant transmission, which necessitates genetic testing for patients and their relatives.1-4 Certain alterations, such as the succinate dehydrogenase (SDH) subunit B gene mutation, are associated with a significant risk of extra-adrenal, malignant, and metastatic disease forms.4-7 This highlights the need for routine genetic counseling and diligent surveillance, as well as surgeon awareness of hereditary paraganglioma-pheochromocytoma syndrome (HPPS)...

The World Health Assembly in May 2021 was a watershed moment in oral health, with the landmark resolution that designated oral diseases as non-communicable diseases (NCDs). This was strongly supported by a host of other NCDs in recognition of the common risk factor principle and acknowledgement of the fact that oral diseases do not occur in isolation from other NCDs, but are commonly associated with cardiovascular disease, diabetes/obesity, respiratory diseases, metabolic syndrome, a range of other inflammatory disorders and cancers...

Digital trace data and machine learning techniques are increasingly being adopted to predict suicide-related outcomes at the individual level; however, there is also considerable public health need for timely data about suicide trends at the population level. Although significant geographic variation in suicide rates exist by state within the United States, national systems for reporting state suicide trends typically lag by one or more years. We developed and validated a deep learning based approach to utilize real-time, state-level online (Mental Health America web-based depression screenings; Google and YouTube Search Trends), social media (Twitter), and health administrative data (National Syndromic Surveillance Program emergency department visits) to estimate weekly suicide counts in four participating states...

OBJECTIVE: The vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (MMR and V) have been mandatory in Italy since 2017. Two different vaccination strategies are suggested for the first dose: trivalent MMR and a separate V vaccine or the tetravalent MMRV vaccine. Our aim is to compare the safety profile of MMRV and MMR-V vaccines through the passive adverse event reporting system in the Veneto region and to perform a case-by-case review of a few conditions of interest (febrile and afebrile seizures, ataxia, encephalitis, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, thrombocytopenia, neutropenia and Henoch-Schönlein Purpura)...

Syndromic surveillance is an effective tool for enabling the timely detection of infectious disease outbreaks and facilitating the implementation of effective mitigation strategies by public health authorities. While various information sources are currently utilized to collect syndromic signal data for analysis, the aggregated measurement of cough, an important symptom for many illnesses, is not widely employed as a syndromic signal. With recent advancements in ubiquitous sensing technologies, it becomes feasible to continuously measure population-level cough incidence in a contactless, unobtrusive, and automated manner...

BACKGROUND: COVID-19 has caused severe morbidity and mortality worldwide. After the end of the dynamic zero-COVID policy in China in December, 2022, concerns regarding reinfection were raised while little was known due to the lack of surveillance data in this country. AIMS: This study reviews the probability, risk factors, and severity of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 Omicron variant reinfection, as well as the interval between infections, risk of onward transmission by reinfected cases, and the role of booster vaccination against reinfection...

BACKGROUND: Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) circulation dropped markedly early in the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by a resurgence with heightened case counts. The "immunity debt" hypothesis proposes that the RSV-naїve pediatric population increased during the period of low transmission. However, the evidence supporting this hypothesis is limited, and the role of changing testing practices in the perceived surge has not been comprehensively evaluated. METHODS: We conducted a multicenter, retrospective analysis of 342 530 RSV encounters and 980 546 RSV diagnostic tests occurring at 32 US pediatric hospitals in 2013-2023...

BACKGROUND: Daratumumab, a first-in-class humanized IgG1κ monoclonal antibody that targets the CD38 epitope, has been approved for treatment of multiple myeloma by FDA. The current study was to evaluate daratumumab-related adverse events (AEs) through data mining of the US Food and Drug Administration Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS). RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: Disproportionality analyses, including the reporting odds ratio (ROR), the proportional reporting ratio (PRR), the Bayesian confidence propagation neural network (BCPNN) and the multi-item gamma Poisson shrinker (MGPS) algorithms were employed to quantify the signals of daratumumab-associated AEs...