Related papers: Religious Festivals and Influenza
Seasonal influenza presents an ongoing challenge to public health. The rapid evolution of the flu virus necessitates annual vaccination campaigns, but the decision to get vaccinated or not in a given year is largely voluntary, at least in…
Influenza occurs every season and occasionally causes pandemics. Despite its low mortality rate, influenza is a major public health concern, as it can be complicated by severe diseases like pneumonia. A fast, accurate and low-cost method to…
Background: Micro-blogging services such as Twitter offer the potential to crowdsource epidemics in real-time. However, Twitter posts ('tweets') are often ambiguous and reactive to media trends. In order to ground user messages in epidemic…
Disease spreading through human travel networks has been a topic of great interest in recent years, as witnessed during outbreaks of influenza A (H1N1) or SARS pandemics. One way to stop spreading over the airline network are travel…
A prompt public health response to a new epidemic relies on the ability to monitor and predict its evolution in real time as data accumulate. The 2009 A/H1N1 outbreak in the UK revealed pandemic data as noisy, contaminated, potentially…
Systems that exploit publicly available user generated content such as Twitter messages have been successful in tracking seasonal influenza. We developed a novel filtering method for Influenza-Like-Illnesses (ILI)-related messages using 587…
Chikungunya is an emerging threat for health security all over the world which is spreading very fast. Researches for proper forecasting of the incidence rate of chikungunya has been going on in many places in which DARPA has done a very…
Influenza is an acute respiratory infection caused by a virus. It is highly contagious and rapidly mutative. However, its epidemiological characteristics are conventionally collected in terms of outpatient records. In fact, the subjective…
When analysing in vitro data, growth kinetics of influenza strains are often compared by computing their growth rates, which are sometimes used as proxies for fitness. However, analogous to mechanistic epidemic models, the growth rate can…
Highly pathogenic avian influenza A(H5N1) has expanded geographically and ecologically, affecting wild birds, mammalian wildlife, domestic animals, and humans. Wildlife surveillance provides critical early warning for One Health…
The threat of avian influenza and the 2004-2005 influenza vaccine supply shortage in the United States has sparked a debate about optimal vaccination strategies to reduce the burden of morbidity and mortality caused by the influenza virus.…
Influenza Pandemic of 1957-1958, also called Asian Flu Pandemic, was one of the most widespread pandemics in history. In this paper, we model the pandemic, considering the effect of the Cold War. There were some restrictions between Western…
Influenza-like illness (ILI) estimation from web search data is an important web analytics task. The basic idea is to use the frequencies of queries in web search logs that are correlated with past ILI activity as features when estimating…
In March and early April 2013, a new avian-origin influenza A (H7N9) virus (A-OIV) emerged in the eastern China. During the first week of April, the 18 infection cases have been confirmed and 6 people have died since March. This virus has…
Forecasting the future course of epidemics has always been one of the main goals of epidemic modelling. This chapter reviews statistical methods to quantify the accuracy of epidemic forecasts. We distinguish point and probabilistic…
We propose and analyse a mathematical model for cholera considering vaccination. We show that the model is epidemiologically and mathematically well posed and prove the existence and uniqueness of disease-free and endemic equilibrium…
Dengue is a mosquito-borne disease that threatens more than half of the world's population. Despite being endemic to over 100 countries, government-led efforts and mechanisms to timely identify and track the emergence of new infections are…
Age-dependent dynamics is an important characteristic of many infectious diseases. Age-group epidemic models describe the infection dynamics in different age-groups by allowing to set distinct parameter values for each. However, such models…
Until now, design of the annual influenza vaccine has relied on phylogenetic or whole-sequence comparisons of the viral coat proteins hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, with vaccine effectiveness assumed to correlate monotonically to the…
We analyze over 500 million Twitter messages from an eight month period and find that tracking a small number of flu-related keywords allows us to forecast future influenza rates with high accuracy, obtaining a 95% correlation with national…