FEMwiki: crowdsourcing semantic taxonomy and wiki input to domain experts while keeping editorial control: Mission Possible!

Highly specialized professional communities of practice (CoP) inevitably need to operate across geographically dispersed area - members frequently need to interact and share professional content. Crowdsourcing using wiki platforms provides a novel way for a professional community to share ideas and collaborate on content creation, curation, maintenance and sharing. This is the aim of the Field Epidemiological Manual wiki (FEMwiki) project enabling online collaborative content sharing and interaction for field epidemiologists around a growing training wiki resource. However, while user contributions are the driving force for content creation, any medical information resource needs to keep editorial control and quality assurance. This requirement is typically in conflict with community-driven Web 2.0 content creation. However, to maximize the opportunities for the network of epidemiologists actively editing the wiki content while keeping quality and editorial control, a novel structure was developed to encourage crowdsourcing – a support for dual versioning for each wiki page enabling maintenance of expertreviewed pages in parallel with user-updated versions, and a clear navigation between the related versions. Secondly, the training wiki content needs to be organized in a semantically-enhanced taxonomical navigation structure enabling domain experts to find information on a growing site easily. This also provides an ideal opportunity for crowdsourcing. We developed a user-editable collaborative interface crowdsourcing the taxonomy live maintenance to the community of field epidemiologists by embedding the taxonomy in a training wiki platform and generating the semantic navigation hierarchy on the fly. Launched in 2010, FEMwiki is a real world service supporting field epidemiologists in Europe and worldwide. The crowdsourcing success was evaluated by assessing the number and type of changes made by the professional network of epidemiologists over several months and demonstrated that crowdsourcing encourages user to edit existing and create new content and also leads to expansion of the domain taxonomy

Selected results of the tuberculosis control program in the Czech Republic

There are probably several causes why steady decrease of tuberculosis incidence stopped. The aim of our work was to investigate a possible relation of tuberculosis incidence in smaller administrative areas with several social and economic characteristics. The individual data were taken from the Information System of Bacillary Tuberculosis, based on laboratory reporting network. Tuberculosis incidence dropped to 19.8/100,000 in 1987 and since then it fluctuates around that level. The levels in districts ranged from 1.9 to 45.6 in 1997. The social status, overcrowding, air pollution and unemployment rates are weakly correlated with tuberculosis incidence. These unfavourable values of social, economical and ecological indicators are linked with more industrialised parts of the country. Age and gender analysis shows that male population aged from 40-60 is the most affected population with higher rates of smear positive pulmonary TB. These rates are positively linked with a size of the municipality, in larger towns higher number of those cases are detected. Contrary to that, relatively higher rates of pulmonary tuberculosis are in elderly women in smaller municipalities. There is a suspicion about important role of relative poverty in the epidemiology of tuberculosis in the Czech Republic. The results indicate that we should concentrate our effort to reduce the incidence of tuberculosis mainly in economically active male populatio

Evaluation of contact tracing activities during the Ebola virus disease outbreak in Guinea, 2015

Abstract Objectives The objective of the study was to present the findings of an audit tool aimed at assessing contact tracing activities during an Ebola outbreak. Methods The tool was based on Ebola guidelines and observations in the field. It was composed of 38 indicators covering contact tracing preparatives, resources, procedures and results. Results All contact tracing teams were assessed in Boké and Conakry prefectures (24 supervisors, 22 community workers, 442 contacts) between 1 July and 10 August 2015. Contact lists had less than a 40% accomplishment rate. 7% of the contacts were not seen by community workers or supervisors. ‘No touch policy' was fully respected. Conclusion Audit checklist helped to systematically identify critical issues related to contact tracing

Harmonizing and supporting infection control training in Europe

Healthcare-associated infection (HCAI), patient safety, and the harmonization of related policies and programmes are the focus of increasing attention and activity in Europe. Infection control training for healthcare workers (HCWs) is a cornerstone of all patient safety and HCAI prevention and control programmes. In 2009 the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) commissioned an assessment of needs for training in infection control in Europe (TRICE), which showed a substantial increase in commitment to HCAI prevention. On the other hand, it also identified obstacles to the harmonization and promotion of training in infection control and hospital hygiene (IC/HH), mostly due to differences between countries in: (i) the required qualifications of HCWs, particularly nurses; (ii) the available resources; and (iii) the sustainability of IC/HH programmes. In 2013, ECDC published core competencies for infection control and hospital hygiene professionals in the European Union and a new project was launched ['Implementation of a training strategy for infection control in the European Union' (TRICE-IS)] that aimed to: define an agreed methodology and standards for the evaluation of IC/HH courses and training programmes; develop a flexible IC/HH taxonomy; and implement an easily accessible web tool in 'Wiki' format for IC/HH professionals. This paper reviews several aspects of the TRICE and the TRICE-IS projects