NCCID Alert: Public Health Approaches to Infectious Disease Prevention & Control
July 28, 2016
Focusing on practices and policies which serve to move beyond individual diseases to more global methods of understanding and approaching public health.
BURDEN OF DISEASE: NCCID RESOURCES
The notion of "burden of disease" is fundamental to public health and population health research. But what does it actually mean? NCCID has developed a series of resources for public health nurses, physicians, planners and policy makers to help them make better sense of the concepts and the measures.
DALYs, or Disability-Adjusted Life Years, are the building blocks for the international Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project. NCCID has developed the primer, Understanding the Measurement of Global Burden of Disease to explain the GBD project and some of the comments that have been made on GBD 2012.
NEW FROM NCCID
There are other ways to think of burden of disease. Framing Burden of Disease is an overview of literature from a variety of disciplines, illustrating the many ways that burden is considered and some of the critiques of the more traditional models.
ARTICLE 'Texting Helps in Fight Against Foodborne Illnesses in Evanston, Ill.' In light of the "one in six Americans ... infected with foodborne illnesses" every year, this story shares how one US city integrated its restaurant inspection scores with an automated system of text message alerts: "Diners just text 'food' to the city’s 311 number, and after a prompt, enter a restaurant name and they’re returned the recent score and inspection date." Source: Government Technology magazine
RESEARCH 'Selection of population controls for a Salmonella case-control study in the UK using a market research panel and web-survey provides time and resource savings'
From Epidemiology and Infection: "Timely recruitment of population controls in infectious disease outbreak investigations is challenging. We evaluated the timeliness and cost of using a market research panel [via web-survey] as a sampling frame for recruiting controls in a case-control study during an outbreak of Salmonella Mikawasima in the UK in 2013."
ARTICLE 'Researchers are studying your Google searches to improve public health'
Look from STAT at how anonymized, aggregate search engine queries, along with other types of Internet data, can "be a treasure trove for researchers who want to study public health," such as tracking vaccine effectiveness.
ARTICLE 'Zika Data From the Lab, and Right to the Web'
New York Times report on "a unique experiment in scientific transparency" at the University of Wisconsin’s primate center: "instead of saving their data [related to Zika virus research] for academic journals, the researchers have posted it almost immediately on a website anyone can visit. The openness of the process thrills scientists, who say it fosters collaboration and speeds research."
Production of this newsletter has been made possible through a financial contribution from PHAC. The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views of PHAC.
