Recent technological advances such as the Foldscope microscope will improve on-the-ground disease surveillance.[1] The ubiquity of cell phones, even in remote locations, may provide another advance in data surveillance and monitoring of disease outbreaks. In an open access article in the Online Journal of Public Health Informatics, researchers present a framework for data collections forms and apps for cell phones that could be used for real time epidemiological analysis.[2] They note that cell phones currently do not have the processing power for large data sets and that uploading the compiled data to cloud servers for epidemiological analysis and interpretation will be necessary. The authors make several suggestions regarding the use of Android as an open source platform and testing existing apps suitable for epidemiological data collection and analysis. They conclude with a “proof of concept” application of a collection form for influenza cases, attempting to distin...
No new human cases of human influenza A(H5N1) infections have been officially reported anywhere in the world since June 2015.[Note] This is a six-month period without reports of any new human cases. Since 2003 when the World Health Organization (WHO) first began reporting human cases of H5N1, the longest interval with no reported H5N1 cases was a span of three months. Three of these 3-month periods of quiescence have occurred, one each in 2004, 2008, and 2012. Is the lack of human H5N1 cases in the last six month a sign that H5N1 is no longer a pandemic threat? Can we breathe a sigh of relief? Paradoxically, the answer is no. The lack of cases in the past six months should not lull us into a sense of complacency. Between January and June in 2015 there were a total of 143 human cases of H5N1 reported. This is the largest number of reported cases of H5N1 in any one year since the WHO started tracking human infections in 2003. The chart below shows the number of H5N1 cases reported by y...
For the purposes of this discussion the current outbreak of H7N9 began November 1, 2016 and is still continuing. More than 460 human cases have been reported from China. Of these cases, 426 have symptom onset dates reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) for cases with onset before February 10, 2017. Graphing the symptom onset dates for these H7N9 cases provides a count of new daily infections of H7N9. Also included in the graph are the remaining 37 cases based on their reporting date rather than symptom onset date which is not available at this time for cases reported after February 11. The graph, an epidemic curve, shows that the greatest number of H7N9 infections occurred on February 1, 2017, based on a five day moving average. Even if The 37 cases for which symptom onset dates are not available are distributed over the 17 days following February 11, they are an insufficient number of new cases to exceed the five-day moving average which peaked above 10 cases per day on Feb...
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