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Risk Assessments

Description

Mass gathering is defined by WHO as – “More than specified number of persons (which can be as few as 1000 persons to more than 25000) at a specific location for a specific purpose (social function, large public event or sports competition) for a defined period of time” . Mass gatherings are considered to have the potential for public health incidents, outbreaks and casualties attributed to the inevitable overcrowding in a place. Because populations are increasingly mobile, and more able to attend large gatherings, the risk for outbreaks of infectious diseases among a susceptible population has increased, and a substantial responsibility is placed on health services if outbreaks occur. Currently, there are no existing programmes of surveillance for mass gathering events in Wales. Although a variety of surveillance system exist, no systematic process is established to gather the information from important large events and collect into a common database for future reference and to study the impact. The number of people attending these gatherings in Wales range from few thousands to 250,000.

Objective

To identify the need of surveillance during mass gathering events in Wales by identifying a causal relationship between public health and characteristics of a mass gathering event grounded on risk assessment.

Submitted by rmathes on
Description

Syndromic surveillance is the real-time collection and interpretation of data to allow the early identification of public health threats and their impact, enabling public health action. Statistical methods are used in syndromic surveillance to identify when the activity of indicator ‘signals’ have significantly increased. A wide range of techniques have been applied to syndromic data internationally. As part of the preparation for the 2012 Olympics Public Health England expanded its syndromic surveillance service. As new syndromic systems were introduced, statistical methods were developed and applied for each system, tailored to the particular system challenges at the time, e.g. a lack of historical data, and regular changes to geographical coverage.

Objective

This paper describes the design and application of a new statistical method for real-time syndromic surveillance, used by Public Health England.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on
Description

An epidemic of ebolavirus in West Africa, which was first identified in March 2014, is now the largest Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak on record. On 8 August 2014, the WHO declared the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). As of 4 September 2014, Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria have reported 3,707 cases (2,106 confirmed, 1,003 probable, and 598 suspected) of EVD with 1,848 deaths (50% case fatality) to the World Health Organization (WHO). Five U.S. citizens have contracted the viral disease – one LiberianAmerican and four medical-aid workers working in Ebola-afflicted countries.

Objective

To categorize and assess the international and domestic health impacts of the 2014 West African Ebola Virus Disease outbreak.

Submitted by rmathes on
Description

Unaccompanied alien children (UAC) are undocumented migrant children who come to the United States unaccompanied by a parent or guardian. The number apprehended UACs originating from the Central America counties of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have increased since FY 2012. Since the beginning of fiscal year 2014, more than 57,000 UACs have been apprehended; double the number that was apprehended in FY 2013. The majority of UACs were apprehended and processed in the Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Rio Grande Valley (RGV) Sector of South Texas. The CBP facilities were not designed to house or care for children for extended periods. Resources and personnel were significantly strained in the management and care of UACs.

Objective

To categorize and assess the health impacts of the 2014 surge of unaccompanied alien children to the Lower Rio Grande Valley Border.

Submitted by rmathes on

In 2014, a dengue outbreak affected northern Mexico and travel-associated dengue cases increased in southern Arizona. While Arizona has not detected a local dengue case, local transmission occurred in Nogales, Sonora, sister city of Nogales, Arizona across the border. The detection of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, a dengue and chikungunya vector, and the frequent human movement across the border with Sonora heightens Arizona’s risk for introducing emerging mosquito-borne diseases. Limited data exists on the extent or seasonality of Aedes mosquitoes in Arizona border counties.

Submitted by uysz on

Antibiotic resistance is an emerging public health concern and the scientific community recognizes the need to evaluate its epidemiology. Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) are a key to this problem. Often found in the natural flora of the skin, nose and mouth of humans and animals, these bacteria can cause both minor skin infections and serious diseases that can result in death. Apart from the hospital concern, this bacterium is becoming increasingly common in infections associated to both human and animal communities with high rates of antibiotic resistance.

Submitted by uysz on
Description

Unhealthy diet is becoming the most important preventable cause of chronic disease burden. Dietary patterns vary across neighborhoods as a function of policy, marketing, social support, economy, and the commercial food environment. Assessment of community-specific response to these socio-ecological factors is critical for the development and evaluation policy interventions and identification of nutrition inequality. Mass administration of dietary surveys is impractical and prohibitory expensive, and surveys typically fail to address variation of food selection at high geographic resolution. Marketing companies such as the Nielsen cooperation continuously collect and centralize scanned grocery transaction records from a geographically representative sample of retail food outlets to guide product promotions. These data can be harnessed to develop a model for the demand of specific foods using store and neighborhood attributes, providing a rich and detailed picture of the “foodscape” in an urban environment. In this study, we generated a spatial profile of food selection from estimated sales in food outlets in the Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) of Montreal, Canada, using regular carbonated soft drinks (i.e. non-diet soda) as an initial example.

Objective

To demonstrate a method for estimating neighborhood food selection with secondary use of digital marketing data; grocery transaction records and retail business registry.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on
Description

There is no safe level of lead in the body, and elevated lead in children can lead to decreased Intelligence Quotients (IQ) and behavioral problems. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends lead testing of children with a positive risk assessment. Children who live in low socioeconomic areas may be at higher risk for lead exposure. As recent events have shown, having an elevated lead poisoning surveillance system can be critical to ensure that there is not a community-wide lead exposure. To reach the children that may not have been screened by a primary care physician, on March 1, 2016 the Sedgwick County Health Department Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program began offering lead screenings to all children in the WIC program and their mothers. Per Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines, the Sedgwick County Health Department Epidemiology program (Epi) investigates anyone who has an elevated blood lead test (5 μg/dL or greater). There are two types of lead tests – screening (capillary finger stick) and confirmatory (venous blood draw). 

Submitted by Magou on

In this webinar, the syndromic surveillance service delivered by Public Health England will be discussed. The presentation will describe the national syndromic surveillance systems used in England (general practitioners, emergency departments, telehealth call services), the routine statistical and analytical methods used to process the data, the 'service' delivered by the team and future data sources under consideration.