Costs of Rabies Control: An Economic Calculation Method Applied to Flores Island

Background: Rabies is a zoonotic disease that, in most human cases, is fatal once clinical signs appear. The disease transmits to humans through an animal bite. Dogs are the main vector of rabies in humans on Flores Island, Indonesia, resulting in about 19 human deaths each year. Currently, rabies control measures on Flores Island include mass vaccination and culling of dogs, laboratory diagnostics of suspected rabid dogs, putting imported dogs in quarantine, and pre-and post-exposure treatment (PET) of humans. The objective of this study was to estimate the costs of the applied rabies control measures on Flores Island. Methodology/principal findings: A deterministic economic model was developed to calculate the costs of the rabies control measures and their individual cost components from 2000 to 2011. The inputs for the economic model were obtained from (i) relevant literature, (ii) available data on Flores Island, and (iii) experts such as responsible policy makers and veterinarians involved in rabies control measures in the past. As a result, the total costs of rabies control measures were estimated to be US$1.12 million (range: US$0.60-1.47 million) per year. The costs of culling roaming dogs were the highest portion, about 39 percent of the total costs, followed by PET (35 percent), mass vaccination (24 percent), pre-exposure treatment (1.4 percent), and others (1.3 percent) (dog-bite investigation, diagnostic of suspected rabid dogs, trace-back investigation of human contact with rabid dogs, and quarantine of imported dogs). Conclusions/significance: This study demonstrates that rabies has a large economic impact on the government and dog owners. Control of rabies by culling dogs is relatively costly for the dog owners in comparison with other measures. Providing PET for humans is an effective way to prevent rabies, but is costly for government and does not provide a permanent solution to rabies in the future

An investigation of classical swine fever virus seroprevalence and risk factors in pigs in East Nusa Tenggara, eastern Indonesia

Classical swine fever virus (CSFV) is a highly infectious disease of pigs. It has had significant impacts on East Nusa Tenggara, eastern Indonesia since its introduction in 1997. In spite of its importance to this region, little is known about its seroprevalence and distribution, and pig-level and farmer-level factors that may have an impact on the serological status of an individual pig. To address this knowledge deficit, a cross-sectional seroprevalence survey was conducted in 2010 involving 2160 pigs and 805 farmers from four islands in the region. Farmer questionnaires and pig record forms were used to collect data about the farmers and pigs surveyed. Blood was collected from each pig to determine its CSFV serological status. Apparent and true prevalence were calculated for each island, district, subdistrict, and village surveyed. CSFV serological status was used as an outcome variable in mixed effects logistic regression analyses.Overall true CSFV seroprevalence was estimated at 17.5% (lower CI 16.0%; upper CI 19.5%). Seroprevalence estimates varied widely across the islands, districts, subdistricts, and villages. Manggarai Barat, a district on the western end of Flores Island, contained pigs that were positive for antibody to CSFV. This result was unexpected, as no clinical cases had been reported in this area. Older pigs and pigs that had been vaccinated for CSFV were more likely to test positive for antibody to CSFV. The final multivariable model accounted for a large amount of variation in the data, however much of this variation was explained by the random effects with less than 2% of the variation explained by pig age and pig CSFV vaccination status.In this study we documented the seroprevalence of CSFV across four islands in East Nusa Tenggara, eastern Indonesia. We also identified risk factors for the presence of antibody to CSFV. Further investigation is needed to understand why clinical CSFV has not been reported on the western end of Flores Island, and to identify additional risk factors that explain CSFV serological status to inform disease control strategies

PSI-Stats: Private Set Intersection Protocols Supporting Secure Statistical Functions

Private Set Intersection (PSI) enables two parties, each holding a private set to securely compute their intersection without revealing other information. This paper considers settings of secure statistical computations over PSI, where both parties hold sets containing identifiers with one of the parties having an additional positive integer value associated with each of the identifiers in her set. The main objective is to securely compute some desired statistics of the associated values for which its corresponding identifiers occur in the intersection of the two sets. This is achieved without revealing the identifiers of the set intersection. In this paper, we present protocols which enable the secure computations of statistical functions over PSI, which we collectively termed PSI-Stats. Implementations of our constructions are also carried out based on simulated datasets as well as on actual datasets in the business use cases that we defined, in order to demonstrate practicality of our solution. PSI-Stats incurs 5x less monetary cost compared to the current state-of-the-art circuit-based PSI approach due to Pinkas et al. (EUROCRYPT\u2719). Our solution is more tailored towards business applications where monetary cost is the primary consideration

PBio: Enabling Cross-organizational Biometric Authentication Service through Secure Sharing of Biometric Templates

Prior works in privacy-preserving biometric authentication mostly focus on the following setting. An organization collects users\u27 biometric data during registration and later authorized access to the organization services after successful authentication. Each organization has to maintain its own biometric database. Similarly each user has to release her biometric information to multiple organizations; Independently, government authorities are making their extensive, nation-wide biometric database available to agencies and organizations, for countries that allow such access. This will enable organizations to provide authentication without maintaining biometric databases, while users only need to register once. However privacy remains a concern. We propose a privacy-preserving system, PBio, for this new setting. The core component of PBio is a new protocol comprising distance recoverable encryption and secure distance computation. We introduce an encrypt-then-split mechanism such that each of the organizations holds only an encrypted partial biometric database. This minimizes the risk of template reconstruction in the event that the encrypted partial database is recovered due to leak of the encryption key. PBio is also secure even when the organizations collude. A by-product benefit is that the use of encrypted partial templates allows quicker rejection for non-matching instances. We implemented a cloud-based prototype with desktop and Android applications. Our experiment results based on real remote users show that PBio is highly efficient. A round-trip authentication takes approximately 74ms (desktop) and 626ms (Android). The computation and communication overhead introduced by our new cryptographic protocol is only about 10ms (desktop) and 54ms (Android)

A targeted investigation to demonstrate the freedom OF west timor from hpai H5N1

In early 2004 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 virus caused major outbreaks of disease in poultry in Indonesia. The disease was first reported in West Timor in eastern Indonesia in the same year, resulting in the death of approximately one hundred chickens from both commercial and backyard farms; however no evidence of disease has subsequently been reported in West Timor since 2007. A targeted survey was undertaken in 2013 in 2 districts of West Timor. Three hundred village and commercial poultry (292 chickens and 8 Muscovy ducks) from 10 villages and 5 live bird markets (LBMs) were sampled between August and October 2013. Swabs of the cloaca and trachea of the sampled birds were tested using the Anigen® Rapid Test (Bionote). All samples were negative on testing (0%; 95%CI: 0.0 – 1.2%). From these results it was concluded with a high level of confidence (100%, 95%CI: 99.988, 100) that this population is not infected, and these results, along with a lack of clinical evidence of disease, support the conclusion that West Timor was free from HPAI infection at the time of the survey

Response of Bali cattle (Bos javanicus) to vaccination with Brucella abortus strain 19 in West Timor

A trial was conducted in two villages (one containing cattle infected with brucellosis and one not containing infected cattle) in Timor, Indonesia to determine the serological response to vaccination with Brucella abortus strain 19 in Bali cattle (Bos javanicus) (n=599). Mature female cattle were immunised with low-dose strain 19 (2×108–6×108 colony forming units) and calves (6–12 months) with high-dose strain 19 (4×1010–12×1010 colony forming units). Other mature females and calves were inoculated with sterile vaccine diluent and formed a non-vaccinated in-contact control group. The seroprevalence and mean titres were highest in the vaccinated cattle 3 months after vaccination. These then receded, however, 1% of vaccinated calves and 1.9% of vaccinated cows from the village without infected cattle were still seropositive on the complement-fixation test (CFT) 24 months after vaccination. Non-vaccinated seropositive animals were more likely to have aborted or had a stillbirth and were less likely to have produced a calf than were seronegative cows from the village containing infected animals. We concluded that strain 19 vaccine induced protection in Bali cattle and that this vaccine might play an important role in the control of bovine brucellosis in Timor

Analyzing risk factors for herd seropositivity to classical swine fever in West Timor, Indonesia

A cross-sectional study was undertaken to identify factors associated with herd-level seropositivity to Classical Swine Fever (CSF) in smallholder pig farms in West Timor, Indonesia. Questionnaires were distributed to 240 pig farmers from 8 villages in two districts to collect information about farm structure and herd information, reproductive management and performance, husbandry, pig introductions and exits, health status, farmers' knowledge and history of vaccination. Three risk factors were found to be associated with the presence of antibodies to CSF in the herd in a multivariable logistic regression model. Seropositivity was associated with the introduction of pigs in the 12-month period preceding the survey (OR 4.78, 95% CI: 1.46, 15.71). Farmers who kept goats were 3.42 (95% CI: 1.20, 9.81) times more likely to have seropositive pigs than farmers without goats. Herds that had been vaccinated against CSF were also 2.33 (95% CI: 1.10, 5.12) times more likely to be seropositive than non-vaccinated herds. This latter positive association is likely to be as a result of antibodies induced by vaccination rather than a true risk factor for infection. The results of the questionnaire highlighted the lack of implementation of biosecurity measures by smallholder farmers in West Timor, which has the potential to increase the risk of their pigs to CSF, as well as other diseases

Weighted Entropy-based Measure for Image Segmentation

AbstractImage segmentation is one of the fundamental and important steps that is needed to prepare an image for further processing in many computer vision applications. Over the last few decades, many image segmentation methods have been proposed, as accurate image segmentation is vitally important for many image, video and computer vision applications. A common approach is to look at the grey level colours of the image to perform multi-level-thresholding. The ability to quantify and compare the resulting segmented images is of vital importance even though it can be a major challenge. One measure used here computes the total distances of the pixels to its centroid for each region to provide a quantifiable measure of the segmented images. We also suggest an improved Zhang's entropy measure for image segmentation based on computing the entropy of the image and segmented regions. In this paper, we will present the results from both of these approaches

On security vulnerabilities and mitigation in the cognition cycle of distributed Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive Radio (CR) enables unlicensed or Secondary Users (SUs) to operate in underutilized spectrum (or white spaces) owned by licensed or Primary Users (PUs) conditional upon PU encountering acceptable interference levels. A Distributed Cognitive Radio Network (DCRN) is a distributed wireless network established by a number of SUs in the absence of fixed network infrastructure such as a base station. Cognition Cycle (CC) is the key concept of CR to provide intelligence to SUs so that they are able to sense for white spaces and carry out an optimal or near-optimal joint action on its operating environment for network-wide performance enhancement. The CC can be applied in various applications in DCRNs such as dynamic channel selection, topology management, congestion control, and scheduling. Popular artificial intelligence approaches such as Reinforcement Learning (RL) have been widely applied to realize the conceptual CC. As with other computer networks, there are security aspects in DCRN but the research into them is still in its infancy. To the best of our knowledge, no attempt has been made to date to investigate security vulnerabilities in DCRN as a result of the application of RL. This paper aims to spark new research interest in this area. We provide our initial investigation on security vulnerabilities, as well as their mitigation, in RL-based applications in DCRNs