Environmental Health

Canada experienced 92 waterborne diseases outbreaks between 1975 and 2001. In addition, at any one time about 1500 communities in Canada are unable to use their drinking water. The source of exposure in disease outbreaks is often not known, so the true disease burden attributable to water related exposure may be much higher. Researchers have investigated risk factors for waterborne disease. However, providing acces to surveiallance tools of use by frontline staff in the field as well as by surveillance professionals was key to making this type of system successful.

Objective

The objectives of this environmental health surveillance system were to provide a robust system for monitoring of water quality trends, and information to be used for mitigation of potential health problems, resource planning, risk analyses and decision making

In the event of a large-scale public health crisis, successfully detecting and assessing health threats and monitoring population health status over a sustained period of time is likely to require integration of information from multiple sources. In addition, this information must be shared at varying levels of detail both among different agencies or organizations within an affected locality and among response participants at local, state, and federal levels of government. In early 2007, the International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) proposed a project to support member initiated consultations on priority unresolved questions in the field of syndromic surveillance (SS) research, development, or practice. The Duval County Health Department sought and obtained ISDS support to address the use of SS data in combination with other human health and veterinary surveillance data, environmental sampling data, and plume modeling results in the event of an airborne bioterrorist (BT) attack. To date, the development of SS in Florida has mainly focused on systems that monitor information from emergency department (ED) visits. In addition, because SS development was decentralized and managed primarily by county health departments, various systems were used in Florida, including ESSENCE, STARS, EARS and BioDefend.

Objective

The objective of this consultation was to develop expert, consensus-based recommendations for use of SS in combination with other human health, animal health, and environmental data sources to improve situational awareness in the event of a large-scale public health emergency. The consultation, convened by the Duval County, Florida, Health Department, involved other local and state public health offi cials from Florida who addressed this question in the context of a hypothetical BT attack scenario in Duval County. Insights arising from the consultation will be used to strengthen public health surveillance capacities as part of both local and state emergency preparedness efforts in Florida. The approach used by the consultation may be useful to other health departments seeking to enhance their emergency situational awareness capacity.

In most disadvantaged communities in Northern Nigeria, adolescent girls engage in economic activities so that they can save money for household items to be bought for them when they are given out for marriage. These girls right from before they reach teenage age hawk items which include ready-to-eat foods. Various socio-cultural and environmental factors reinforce vulnerability of foods to microorganisms. Food safety awareness, knowledge and practices among food vendors can be affected by interplay between individual and outdoor factors. Teenagers engage in hawking food without understanding food-related risks for the preservation of their health and the health of others. Food hygiene is the conditions and measures necessary to ensure the safety of food from production to consumption. Lack of adequate food hygiene can lead to foodborne diseases and death of the consumer. Mishandling of food can occur during food preparation, handling and storage; and studies show that consumers have inadequate knowledge about measures needed to prevent food-borne illness. There are a number of factors which are likely to contribute to outbreaks of food-borne illness in the home, including a raw food supply that may be contaminated, a lack of food safety knowledge among the general public, mistakes in food handling and preparation at home.

Chagas’ disease, caused by the protozoan Trypanosoma cruzi, is spread mostly by Triatominae bugs. High carbon dioxide emission and strong infra-red (IR) radiation are indicative of their presence. Periods of low atmospheric water saturation favor their dispersal, when the bugs’ IR perception is high.

The Fast Subset Scan (FSScan) is very efficient for the detection of the most likely geographic cluster. Covariate studies associating the presence of regular clusters with environmental factors are routinely done using the Circular Scan, the simplest version of the Spatial Scan statistic. However, if the study employs irregular clusters instead, accurate results depend on the generation of a rich family of variants of the primary cluster.

Objective

We employ climate information to assess the possible spatial dependence on the occurrence of Chagas’ disease irregular clusters in Central Brazil, using a variant of the Spatial Scan Statistic, the Geo-Dynamic Scan (GDScan).