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Suicide is a leading cause of mortality in the United States, causing about 45,000 deaths annually. Research suggests that universal screening in health care settings may be beneficial for prevention, but few studies have combined detailed suicide circumstances with ED encounter data to better understand care-seeking behavior prior to death.

Objective: To identify potential emergency department (ED) visits prior to suicide deaths in North Carolina (NC) and describe pre-suicide care-seeking in EDs.

Submitted by elamb on

In May of 2001, Boston released a strategic transportation plan to improve bicycle access and safety. [1] According to the Boston Transportation Department, ridership has increased 122% between 2007 and 2009. [2] A collaborative public health and public safety task force was initiated in 2010 to foster a safe and healthy bicycling environment.

Objective

To quantify the injury burden and identify possible risk factors using bicycle related injury (BRI) visits at Boston emergency departments (ED).

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on

Presented November 8, 2018.

The data and program leads from Public Health – Seattle & King County’s firearm data team will discuss how their local health department produces and analyzes some of the best available firearm injury prevention data in the country, including information from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS) firearm module. We will describe how our data have been used in community, policy, and health care settings and discuss relevant lessons learned.

Presenters

Infectious disease surveillance is important for disease control as well as to inform prevention and treatment [1]. While influenza surveillance data coverage and quality has improved significantly in recent years due to resource investments and advances in information technology, the need remains for improvements in data dissemination to the wider community.

Objective

This paper describes a review of modes and styles of the online dissemination of national influenza surveillance data.

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on

Health care workers (HCWs) have an increased risk of exposure to infectious agents including (among others) tuberculosis, influenza, norovirus, and Clostridium difficile as a consequence of patient care1,2 Most occupational transmission is associated with violation of one or more basic principles of infection control: handwashing; vaccination of HCWs; and prompt isolation.3 OH surveillance is paramount in guiding efforts to improve worker safety and health and to monitor trends and progress over time.4 GIS can assist in supporting health situation analysis and surveillance for the prevention and control of health problems, for example: by creating temporal-spatial maps of outbreaks, public health workers can visualize the spread of cases as the outbreak progresses; spatial/database queries allow for selection of a specific location or condition to focus public health resources.

Objective

This paper describes a GIS tool which maps the floors and departments of a Southeastern Ontario tertiary care hospital for the purpose of monitoring respiratory and gastrointestinal (GI)-related Occupational Health (OH) visits among hospital employees.

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on

Since its detection in 1999 in New York, WNV spread westward across the continent, and was first detected in California in 2003 in Imperial County. In California and in many states, birds, especially corvids, are used as sentinel animals to detect WNV activity. Recent seroprevalence studies have shown WNV activity in different wild mammalian species; in the United States, WNV sero-prevalence in some studies in raccoons has ranged from 34–46%. In addition, it has been shown that after experimental infection, raccoons can attain high viral titers and shed WNV in their saliva and feces. Given their peridomestic nature, we investigated the feasibility of their use as sentinels for early warning of WNV and as indicators of WNV activity as a strategy to better localize WNV transmission foci in guiding vector control efforts.

 

Objective

To investigate the potential of utilizing raccoons as sentinels for West Nile Virus (WNV) in an effort to guide public health surveillance, prevention, and control efforts.

Submitted by hparton on

Cold weather exposure-related injuries range from hypothermia to less severe conditions such as frost bite, trench foot, and chilblains, which are all preventable causes of mortality and morbidity. In recent years, NYC has successfully used syndromic surveillance of heat-related ED visits to inform emergency response during heat waves. Similar timely surveillance of cold-exposure related injuries could also inform public health protection measures during severe winter weather or cold season power outages. We conducted a retrospective analysis to compare hypothermia and cold-injury patient case characteristics, as well as temporal and meteorological correlates, between syndromic surveillance data and hospital discharge data.

Objective:

1) Develop cold exposure-related injury syndromic case definitions

2) use historical data to compare trends among cases identified in syndromic surveillance and cases identified in NY Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS) hospital discharge data to evaluate representativeness and

3) develop regression models to examine relationships with cold weather conditions, and compare relationships across case definitions and data sources.

 

Submitted by Magou on

The Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak in West Africa was unprecedented in spread and its attendant response. There were over 15 000 confirmed cases and over 9 000 suspected cases. The response to the outbreak was massive within Africa and beyond. The outbreak in Nigeria affected 19 people and led to 7 deaths (CFR 37%).There were more than 891 contacts of these cases under surveillance as at 23rd September 2014. Nigeria was declared EVD free by the World Health Organization in October 2014. Nationwide there was targeted preparedness to prevent and control EVD. In Zaria, this led to the formation of a joint committee of the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) and the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital (ABUTH) to prevent and control EVD in Zaria and the sub region as a whole.

Objective:

To assess the formation and function of a joint committee of the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) and the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital (ABUTH) to prevent and control EVD in Zaria and the North West sub region of Nigeria.

Submitted by elamb on

Major global stakeholder groups including the United Nations, World Health Organization and Institute of Medicine seek to raise awareness of the threat to global health and security of chronic and non-communicable diseases. These conditions comprise 50-85% of the global annual morbidity burden and constitute a major drain on national economies. To move from awareness of this problem to action and amelioration of issues, we need effective means for monitoring and intervening with populations using approaches that span primary, secondary and tertiary prevention.

Objective

To characterize current and future approaches to surveillance of chronic and non-communicable diseases and establish the agenda for both methodological and condition-specific progress.

 

Submitted by Magou on

Falls are a leading cause of fatal and nonfatal injury in NC. As the size of the older adult population is predicted to increase over the next few decades, it is likely that the incidence of falls-related morbidity and mortality will increase in tandem. In order to address this public health emergency, the Injury and Violence Prevention Branch (IVPB) of the NC Division of Public Health has partnered with the Carolina Center for Health Informatics (CCHI) in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to perform falls surveillance activities. This abstract describes some of the specific research and surveillance activities currently ongoing in NC.

Objective:

To describe how a successful partnership between state public health and a university organization has used epidemiologic data, such as mortality, hospital discharge, and emergency department (ED) visit data, to inform falls prevention activities in North Carolina (NC).

Submitted by elamb on
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