Trends in Notifiable Infectious Diseases in China: Implications for Surveillance and Population Health Policy

This study aimed to analyse trends in notifiable infectious diseases in China, in their historical context. Both English and Chinese literature was searched and diseases were categorised according to the type of disease or transmission route. Temporal trends of morbidity and mortality rates were calculated for eight major infectious diseases types. Strong government commitment to public health responses and improvements in quality of life has led to the eradication or containment of a wide range of infectious diseases in China. The overall infectious diseases burden experienced a dramatic drop during 1975–1995, but since then, it reverted and maintained a gradual upward trend to date. Most notifiable diseases are contained at a low endemic level; however, local small-scale outbreaks remain common. Tuberculosis, as a bacterial infection, has re-emerged since the 1990s and has become prevalent in the country. Sexually transmitted infections are in a rapid, exponential growth phase, spreading from core groups to the general population. Together human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), they account for 39% of all death cases due to infectious diseases in China in 2008. Zoonotic infections, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), rabies and influenza, pose constant threats to Chinese residents and remain the most deadly disease type among the infected individuals. Therefore, second-generation surveillance of behavioural risks or vectors associated with pathogen transmission should be scaled up. It is necessary to implement public health interventions that target HIV and relevant coinfections, address transmission associated with highly mobile populations, and reduce the risk of cross-species transmission of zoonotic pathogens

CMD: a Cotton Microsatellite Database resource for Gossypium genomics

BACKGROUND: The Cotton Microsatellite Database (CMD) is a curated and integrated web-based relational database providing centralized access to publicly available cotton microsatellites, an invaluable resource for basic and applied research in cotton breeding. DESCRIPTION: At present CMD contains publication, sequence, primer, mapping and homology data for nine major cotton microsatellite projects, collectively representing 5,484 microsatellites. In addition, CMD displays data for three of the microsatellite projects that have been screened against a panel of core germplasm. The standardized panel consists of 12 diverse genotypes including genetic standards, mapping parents, BAC donors, subgenome representatives, unique breeding lines, exotic introgression sources, and contemporary Upland cottons with significant acreage. A suite of online microsatellite data mining tools are accessible at CMD. These include an SSR server which identifies microsatellites, primers, open reading frames, and GC-content of uploaded sequences; BLAST and FASTA servers providing sequence similarity searches against the existing cotton SSR sequences and primers, a CAP3 server to assemble EST sequences into longer transcripts prior to mining for SSRs, and CMap, a viewer for comparing cotton SSR maps. CONCLUSION: The collection of publicly available cotton SSR markers in a centralized, readily accessible and curated web-enabled database provides a more efficient utilization of microsatellite resources and will help accelerate basic and applied research in molecular breeding and genetic mapping in Gossypium spp