Flu Outbreak Research Articles

Swine flu-have we learnt any lesson from the past?

The world has suffered the pandemics due to swine flu in the past. The present epidemic in India has claimed many lives. Even, after the first outbreak of swine flu in 2009 no concrete efforts are done to prevent this infection. There is an urgent need to take radical steps to prevent such epidemics.

Fear and Trust: How Risk Perceptions of Avian Influenza Affect the Demand for Chicken

This article quantifies the impact of H7N9 bird flu on chicken demand and consumer willingness to pay (WTP) in China. The surveys were administered to the same group of respondents in April 2012 and 2013. In 2012 we asked generic questions regarding food safety in chilled chicken without any mentioning of bird flu and in 2013 in the midst of the outbreak we resurveyed the group again. Since these respondents were surveyed both times (before and after the bird flu outbreak), the data formed a “natural experiment”. We measure risk perception, fear and trust against actual reduction in consumption and stated change in WTP for safe chicken between 2012 and 2013. Through a survey conducted in each year on the same Chinese urban consumers, we are able to construct a Marshallian-Hicksian elasticity measure signifying the relative welfare loss from a food risk. Furthermore, we found that: (1) like fear, the impact of distrust (especially the distrust in government) was negative for consumption; (2) macro fear of H7N9’s spreading, and distrust in government enhanced the deviation of consumption and WTP; (3) stronger consumer heterogeneity in consumption existed in cities with higher number of incidences; (4) the sheer mentioning of H7N9 is more important and negative than whether it was associated with a risk-perception reducing or risk-perception elevating message given to consumers; and (5) unlike what the conventional theory would predict that upon the rising of a specific risk factor, demand will drop and WTP for safter products will increase, while consumption of chicken never increased after the emergence of H7N9 in 2013, WTP for safer chicken did not increase either relative to generic risks associated with consuming chicken in 2012.

Syndromic Surveillance using Twitter Data

The Federal Department of Health website in Australia on 22 October reported that in 2014 influenza A (H1N1) dominated across most jurisdictions throughout the season, however influenza A (H3N2) was predominant in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, with late season increases noted in Queensland, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Tasmania. This paper used daily counts of flu symptom tweets to describe the differences in the outbreaks across the various states and territories in Australia for the 2014 season. However, the tweet data indicates a two wave flu outbreak for Victoria that was not picked up in this report. This paper also illustrates that the flu outbreaks for flu in some states were no different to the 2013 flu season while in others it was significantly greater for a long period. The varying nature of the burden of this disease in Australia is outlined in this paper but the variable nature of the outbreaks across Australia is difficult to explain or understand. Future efforts should be devoted to understanding these differences.

1063Estimating Health Outcomes of Antiviral Use in Influenza (flu) Outbreaks by Linking PK/PD and Epidemiology via Transmission Dynamic Model: A Novel Approach

1063Estimating Health Outcomes of Antiviral Use in Influenza (flu) Outbreaks by Linking PK/PD and Epidemiology via Transmission Dynamic Model: A Novel Approach

Shikimic acid, a base compound for the formulation of swine/avian flu drug: statistical optimization, fed-batch and scale up studies along with its application as an antibacterial agent

The sudden outbreak of swine flu has increased the global demand of shikimic acid which is an industrially interesting compound, as it is used as a key starting material for the synthesis of a neuraminidase inhibitor Tamiflu(®), for the treatment of antiviral infections such as swine flu. Statistical optimization and evaluation of medium components for the production of shikimic acid by Citrobacter freundii is addressed in the present investigation. Plackett-Burman design was applied for the screening of the most significant variables affecting shikimic acid production, where glucose, asparagine, KH2PO4, CaCO3 and agitation rate were the most significant factors. Response surface methodology was also employed to study the interaction among the most significant variables through which shikimic acid production increased to 12.76 g/L. Further, fed-batch studies resulted in the production of 22.32 g/L of shikimic acid. The scalability of the process was also confirmed by running 14 L bioreactor (7.5 L production medium) where 20.12 g/L of shikimic acid was produced. In addition the antibacterial activity of the shikimic acid produced was analysed against four Gram positive and four Gram negative bacteria and it was found to have a greater inhibition effect against the Gram negative bacteria.

The Guarantee Clause and Federal Power to Supersede State Authority at the Edge of an Avian Flu Pandemic

Research suggests that aggressive action in the early stages of a pandemic can cut deaths dramatically. But if a state fails to act -- whether due to incompetence or lack of political will -- the federal government must. Yet, if federal intervention within a state becomes necessary to prevent a future national emergency, the question becomes one of under what authority. There are limited routes that would provide the federal government with authority to supersede a state government during a local outbreak. Possible sources of authority may include the National Emergencies Act, the Stafford Act, martial law and the Guarantee Clause of the Constitution. An examination of each, using national avian flu preparedness policies as an example, demonstrates that the Guarantee Clause is the only one that would provide the necessary authority for the federal government to take affirmative action within a state to suppress a localized avian flu outbreak.

When boys wear pink: A gendered color cue violation evokes risk taking.

A primary way to signal gender differences starting in infancy is via a clothing color cue (pink is for girls, not boys). We examined whether a violation of this seemingly innocuous gendered prescription would lead to differential decision making regarding infants’ health and well being. In Experiment 1, participants were given an adaptation of the Asian Disease Problem (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981) describing a flu outbreak expected to affect male infants, who were dressed in pink or blue. Participants tended to choose the risk-averse treatment for boys in blue, consistent with Tversky and Kahneman’s theorizing and findings. In contrast, participants tended to opt for the risk-taking treatment for boys in pink, consistent with research highlighting people’s tendency to place lower subjective value on the lives of individuals who belong to socially devalued groups. Experiment 2 ruled out a possible expectancy effect with a different natural category. We discuss the reification of clothing color for demarcating masculinity as a societal attempt at policing gender and situate the findings in a cognitive consistency framework.

Comment on rsekcsanndi Mezzgazdassgi

Annotation of Case C-56/13 Ersekcsanadi Mezőgazdasagi Zrt v Bacs-Kiskun Megyei Kormanyhivatal (Court of Justice, 22 May 2014) In May 2014, the Court of Justice delivered a judgment in which a Hungarian concern unsuccessfully sought damages from the Hungarian authorities for economic loss caused to it by an EU ban, prompted by an outbreak of avian flu. In this annotation, the author submits that the decision is important for two reasons. Firstly, it is important in the way that it sheds light on the interpretation to be given to Article 51(1) of the Charter, and reveals more of the Court’s jurisdictional teething problems where the Charter is concerned. However, secondly, it is important in its problematic reading, or possible misreading, of Article 17 of the Charter on the right to property, and particularly the issue of fair compensation, guaranteed by that provision. The author contends that there is a right to compensation, at EU level, where property is controlled by a Member State in implementation of EU law.

Characterizing Influenza surveillance systems performance: application of a Bayesian hierarchical statistical model to Hong Kong surveillance data.

BackgroundInfectious disease surveillance is a process the product of which reflects both actual disease trends and public awareness of the disease. Decisions made by patients, health care providers, and public health professionals about seeking and providing health care and about reporting cases to health authorities are all influenced by the information environment, which changes constantly. Biases are therefore imbedded in surveillance systems; these biases need to be characterized to provide better situational awareness for decision-making purposes. Our goal is to develop a statistical framework to characterize influenza surveillance systems, particularly their correlation with the information environment.MethodsWe identified Hong Kong influenza surveillance data systems covering healthcare providers, laboratories, daycare centers and residential care homes for the elderly. A Bayesian hierarchical statistical model was developed to examine the statistical relationships between the influenza surveillance data and the information environment represented by alerts from HealthMap and web queries from Google. Different models were fitted for non-pandemic and pandemic periods and model goodness-of-fit was assessed using common model selection procedures.ResultsSome surveillance systems — especially ad hoc systems developed in response to the pandemic flu outbreak — are more correlated with the information environment than others. General practitioner (percentage of influenza-like-illness related patient visits among all patient visits) and laboratory (percentage of specimen tested positive) seem to proportionally reflect the actual disease trends and are less representative of the information environment. Surveillance systems using influenza-specific code for reporting tend to reflect biases of both healthcare seekers and providers.ConclusionsThis study shows certain influenza surveillance systems are less correlated with the information environment than others, and therefore, might represent more reliable indicators of disease activity in future outbreaks. Although the patterns identified in this study might change in future outbreaks, the potential susceptibility of surveillance data is likely to persist in the future, and should be considered when interpreting surveillance data.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1471-2458-14-850) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Big data diagnostics.

A little over a year ago, a damning report published in the journal Nature (1) sent a ripple through the public health and social science communities: in a season of unusually high flu outbreak, one of the world's newest biosurveillance systems was inaccurately predicting flu trends. Google Flu Trends (GFT),3 launched in 2008, is an attempt by Google to predict, in real time, the prevalence of influenza-like infection (2). In combination with computer modeling, the company mines data records for flu-related keyword searches, producing a map of on-the-ground flu activity. GFT predicts trends at the local and state levels, and nationally in at least 29 countries around the world (3). “The GFT effort is a prominent one in the field,” says Dr. David Lazer, a professor of political science and computer and information science at Northeastern University, in an e-mail to Clinical Chemistry . As his professional title would indicate, Lazer is no stranger to big data and has been a proponent for big data analysis in public health. The Nature report highlights that in the peak of the 2012–2013 US flu outbreak, GFT's national “peak of flu” was almost double that of the CDC. (The report also points out that in other countries, GFT was hitting projected targets.) Lazer, an early supporter of GFT, admits he had not closely examined the product. “It then was widely reported that it had missed by a huge margin last winter, which begged the question: why?” he says. This past March, Lazer and a team of colleagues from Northeastern and Harvard universities published their answer to that question in the journal Science (4). In looking at GFT trends, Lazer and colleagues write that since well before 2013, “GFT had been persistently overestimating flu prevalence.” For example, the team found …

Social media trends for health librarians: a primer on using social media for clinical disease surveillance

This column introduces health librarians to the relatively new field of clinical disease surveillance. As such, it looks at how social media is currently being used around the world to track illnesses in real time by using key international websites such as Google Flu and HealthMaps. Clinical surveillance is a term that refers to an ongoing collection and analysis of health data about diseases that may pose a threat to public health [1]. Many international institutions, such as the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control [2], use databases and computer systems to track flu outbreaks, infection rates of the human immune deficiency virus (HIV), and bioterrorism threats. Further, according to the CDC

A flow-through chromatography process for influenza A and B virus purification

Vaccination is still the most efficient measure to protect against influenza virus infections. Besides the seasonal wave of influenza, pandemic outbreaks of bird or swine flu represent a high threat to human population. With the establishment of cell culture-based processes, there is a growing demand for robust, economic and efficient downstream processes for influenza virus purification. This study focused on the development of an economic flow-through chromatographic process avoiding virus strain sensitive capture steps. Therefore, a three-step process consisting of anion exchange chromatography (AEC), Benzonase® treatment, and size exclusion chromatography with a ligand-activated core (LCC) was established, and tested for purification of two influenza A virus strains and one influenza B virus strain. The process resulted in high virus yields (≥68%) with protein contamination levels fulfilling requirements of the European Pharmacopeia for production of influenza vaccines for human use. DNA was depleted by ≥98.7% for all strains. The measured DNA concentrations per dose were close to the required limits of 10ng DNA per dose set by the European Pharmacopeia. In addition, the added Benzonase® could be successfully removed from the product fraction.Overall, the presented downstream process could potentially represent a simple, robust and economic platform technology for production of cell culture-derived influenza vaccines.

Epidemics and pandemics in general practice. What can we learn from the swine flu (H1N1) and EHEC outbreak?

ZusammenfassungHintergrundAls Primärbehandler mit Koordinationsfunktion haben die hausärztlich tätigen Ärztinnen und Ärzte im Rahmen von Epidemien/Pandemien eine Schlüsselrolle. Bisher gibt es keine Untersuchungen darüber, welche Schwierigkeiten sich aus hausärztlicher Sicht bei der Patientenversorgung während vergangener Epidemien/Pandemien in Deutschland ergaben.FragestellungZiel der vorliegenden Studie ist die Identifikation von Problembereichen in der hausärztlichen Patientenversorgung während der H1N1- und EHEC-Ausbrüche. Daraus werden Empfehlungen zur Sicherstellung der Patientenversorgung bei zukünftigen Epidemien/Pandemien abgeleitet.Material und MethodenEs wurden 12 qualitative, semistrukturierte offene Leitfadeninterviews mit Hausärzten in Hamburg und Lübeck durchgeführt, transkribiert und mittels qualitativer Inhaltsanalyse ausgewertet.ErgebnisseEs konnten 5 Bereiche der ambulanten Patientenversorgung identifiziert werden, in denen aus hausärztlicher Sicht Handlungsbedarf besteht: Bereitstellung von Informationen für Hausärzte, Arbeitsbelastung, Finanzierung ausbruchbedingter Maßnahmen, Praxisorganisation, Versorgung der Erkrankten.DiskussionInsbesondere die Arbeitsbelastung der Hausärzte kann und sollte im Fall einer Epidemie/Pandemie durch eine gelungene, zentralisierte Informationspolitik gesenkt werden. Die Koordinationsfunktion der Hausärzte sollte gestärkt werden, um den stationären Sektor im Ernstfall zu entlasten. Die gesicherte Finanzierung ausbruchbedingter Maßnahmen kann dazu beitragen, die Patientenbehandlung sicherzustellen.

The Swine Flu Emergency Department: The Relationship Between Media Attention for the Swine Flu and Registrations in an Emergency Medicine Unit

When the world is faced with a new potential pandemic outbreak, the media report heavily about it. Media are an important disseminator of health threat information. This study examined potential media effects during the 2009 outbreak of A/H1N1 influenza. To examine the relationship between media reports of the swine flu and self-registrations in an emergency department (ED) of a tertiary hospital in Flanders, Belgium. All articles concerning swine flu published in seven Flemish newspapers were selected during the biggest flu peak in Belgium. This number was compared with the number of patients who presented themselves with a self-diagnosis of swine flu symptoms during the same time frame. The Pearson's correlation coefficient was selected to determine the relationship. The cross-correlation function determined the direction of this relationship. A strong correlation was found between the number of potential patients (n = 308) and the number of articles in the Flemish press (n = 1657). The number of patients was the leading indicator; increases in the volume of written press followed increases in the number of patients. Media reporting is extensive when a new infectious disease breaks out and intensifies when it is feared that pandemic levels are reached. This was also the case with the swine flu outbreak in Flanders. These findings suggest that a rise in the number of media reports follows a rise in the number of cases, rather than the reverse.

Spreading Of Avian Flu On Duck And Its Impact On Social Economy: Lesson Learnt From Avian Flu Cases On Chicken

Bird flu disease that attacks duck dismissed the notion of duck immune to bird flu disease. Learning from the experience of bird flu disease that attacks poultry in the year of 2004-2005, necessary to measure the spread of disease prevention bird flu in ducks. This paper aims to describe the business and trade patterns of duck associated with the spread of avian influenza and predict the socio-economic impact of bird flu on duck farms in Indonesia. Duck rearing patterns mostly are in the extensive and semi-intensive system, that have large potential disease transmission occured between duck and wild. Illegal trade in the crossborder region and imports from countries that re-export it, ias alo become potential as well as the entry point to the bird flu virus in Indonesia. Ducks trade between regions by land transportation is difficult to control as well becomes the potential media to spread of the virus to a wider area. The economic impact of bird flu on duck business occured due to the death of ducks, decline in production and loss of job opportunities, while that on demand reduction was not significant. Small scale farmers that were bankrupt as a result of bird flu outbreaks may require technical assistance and access to capital for recovery. In the future, development of ducks business should be directed at duck farms into a semi-intensive and intensive system to facilitate the control of epidemic diseases. Key words: Bird flu, ducks, impact, social economic

Understanding of and Possible Strategies to Avian Influenza Outbreak

Swine flu and avian flu outbreaks have occurred in recent years in addition to seasonal flu. As mortality rate records are not available at the early stage of an outbreak, two parameters may be useful to assess the viral virulence : 1. the time required for the first domestic case in a newly involved region, and 2. the doubling time of new infected cases. Viral virulence is one of the most important factors in guiding short term and immediate responses. Although routine surveillance and repeated vaccination are useful efforts, some novel strategies that may be relevant to prevent and control the spread of influenza among human beings and domestic animals are discussed.

A Dangerous Trade-off : Policymaking in the Era of Big Data

A Dangerous Trade-off :Policymaking in the Era of Big Data Ilaria Mazzocco (bio) Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 256 pp. One of the most astonishing aspects of Edward Snowden’s revelations and the consequent congressional hearings regarding the NSA’s data collection activities was the sheer size of the program. While the notion of living in an increasingly connected and digitalized world is widely recognized, it is easy to overlook how this state of constant communication is shaping business and government and what this means for our society as a whole. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, and Kenneth Cukier, Data Editor for The Economist, are certain that we live on the cusp of the next paradigm shift. With this in mind, the authors of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think set out to build a framework for understanding how technology allows us to process increasingly large amounts of information, how we can use this information, and why big data may be the biggest thing since the printing press. At the heart of the book is the idea that we are seeing a qualitative shift in knowledge as we increase the size of the information we process. Sampling was a revolutionary instrument, but in many fields it may outlive its usefulness as we now have the opportunity to work with samples so large they come close to including the entire statistical population. The authors make a strong case for building a new methodology for the big data [End Page 157] universe. Thanks to several convincing examples, largely from the business sector, Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier argue that, in the future, knowledge must rely less on causal links and more on imprecise data collected from an increasingly large number of sources. It is counterintuitive that one of the greatest achievements of modern science—precision—is what we must give up in order to achieve more accurate results in the future. Big data, the authors argue, is inherently messy. The crux of their argument holds that approximation on such a massive scale produces reasonably reliable results, and often does so without the need to create models as complex as those required for smaller samples. Examples ranging from grammar correction software to credit analysis indicate that the ability to prioritize quantity over quality can make a big difference. Companies that embrace using data of dubious quality in order to achieve massive scale are more nimble and quick—crucial elements in today’s business world. Logic may be one of the most powerful tools to be developed by the human mind, yet to use big data we may need to leave logic behind. One of the main consequences of practicing analysis of big data is that we can learn relatively little about causation even as we are able to make predictions more accurately than ever before. Companies like Walmart, Target, and Amazon have successfully found patterns in their consumers’ behavior that enable them to make smarter marketing choices. These patterns do not mean these companies need, or even have the ability, to understand why women purchase unscented lotion during their third month of pregnancy, but it allows them to target the right customers. Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier believe that in a world where correlation can predict the next flu outbreak by tracking Google searches, causal links are no longer as important—and may even be misleading. The idea that causal links are becoming obsolete is one of the more significant and controversial points in the authors’ argument. While companies may be able to part with causality as they build more effective marketing strategies, it is problematic to encourage this approach among policymakers. If society does not develop the instruments to understand why a child performs poorly in school, there is little to gain from knowing which student will start falling behind first. Moreover, as policymakers rely increasingly on correlation in social matters, it will become harder to avoid profiling...

Structural Properties of Membrane Inserted Fusion Peptide from Influenza Virus Analysed by Molecular Simulation

Influenza virus is responsible for worldwide outbreaks of flu, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths every year, which rise to millions in pandemic years. In order to infect the host cells, influenza virus promotes the fusion of the viral and host membranes. This process is mediated by hemagglutinin (HA), a glycoprotein located on the surface of the viral envelope. Influenza HA has a highly conserved N-terminal domain, comprising ∼20 residues, which inserts into the host membrane. This region is critical for destabilizing target membranes during the fusion process and is known as fusion peptide (FP).To elucidate the molecular determinants that lead to the destabilization of biological membranes by the FP, we used a molecular dynamics (MD) approach. We performed simulations with the wild type and four different FP mutants: G1V, W14A, G4A/G8A/G16A/G20A, and G12A/G13A, which are known or expected to have an impaired fusogenic activity. Our aim is to understand how these mutations affect the conformational distribution of the peptide and its ability to destabilize the membrane.Given that lipid membranes are very viscous, it is difficult to obtain reasonable sampling using standard MD. Therefore, in addition to standard MD simulations, we also performed bias-exchange metadynamics simulations, both in water and in a DMPC membrane. These simulations enable us to compare the energy landscapes of the wild type and mutant peptides and explain how these mutations affect the fusogenic ability of the peptide.

Modeling the impact of twitter on influenza epidemics.

Influenza remains a serious public-health problem worldwide. The rising popularity and scale of social networking sites such as Twitter may play an important role in detecting, affecting, and predicting influenza epidemics. In this paper, we develop a simple mathematical model including the dynamics of ``tweets'' --- short, 140-character Twitter messages that may enhance the awareness of disease, change individual's behavior, and reduce the transmission of disease among a population during an influenza season. We analyze the model by deriving the basic reproductive number and proving the stability of the steady states. A Hopf bifurcation occurs when a threshold curve is crossed, which suggests the possibility of multiple outbreaks of influenza. We also perform numerical simulations, conduct sensitivity test on a few parameters related to tweets, and compare modeling predictions with surveillance data of influenza-like illness reported cases and the percentage of tweets self-reporting flu during the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak in England and Wales. These results show that social media programs like Twitter may serve as a good indicator of seasonal influenza epidemics and influence the emergence and spread of the disease.

The Design of Compass/BeiDou Navigation Satellite Terminal for Migrant Bird Research

A terminal of Compass Navigation Satellite System (CNSS), which can not only support BeiDou-1 and BeiDou-2 but also support Global Positioning System (GPS), is designed to research the activities of the migrant birds, with our novel design of a multiband antenna. By a high-density integration, this terminal is designed with a compact size and light weight. When the terminal is assembled to a whooper swan, its flying trace is recorded by the CNSS, which is in agreement with that of GPS. The flying route map based on the CNSS is useful to check the situation and habit of the migrant bird, which is important for animal protection and bird flu outbreak prediction.