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Civil Unrest

Description

Argus is an event-based, multi-lingual surveillance system which captures and analyzes information from publicly available Internet media. Argus produces reports that summarize and contextualize indications and warning (I&W) of emerging threats, and makes these reports available to the system's users. The significance of the Escherichia coli (EHEC) outbreak analyzed here lies primarily in the fact that it raised epidemiological questions and public health infrastructure concerns that have yet to be resolved, and required the development of new resources for detecting and responding to newly-emerging epidemics.

 

Objective

To demonstrate how event-based biosurveillance, using direct and indirect I&W of disease, provides early warning and situational awareness of the emergence of infectious diseases that have the potential to cause social disruption and negatively impact public health infrastructure, trade, and the economy. Specifically, tracking of I&W during the 2011 enterohaemorrhagic EHEC O104:H4 outbreak in Germany and Europe was selected to illustrate this methodology.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

As part of a wide-spread community discussion on the presence of monuments to Confederate Civil War figures, the Charlottesville city council voted to remove a statue of General Robert E. Lee. Multiple rallies were then held to protest the statue’s removal. A Ku Klux Klan (KKK) rally on July 8, 2017 (MMWR Week 27) and a Unite the Right rally on August 12, 2017 (MMWR Week 32) held in Charlottesville both resulted in violence and media attention. The violence associated with the Unite the Right rally included fatalities connected to motor vehicle and helicopter crashes. Syndromic surveillance has been used to study the impact of terrorism on a community’s mental health while more traditional data sources have looked at the impact of racially-charged civil unrest. Syndromic surveillance, however, has not previously been used to document the effect of racially-charged violence on the health of a community.

Objective:

To describe the impact of civil unrest on the mental health of a community in near real-time using syndromic surveillance.

Submitted by elamb on