A systematic review on integration mechanisms in human and animal health surveillance systems with a view to addressing global health security threats

Lymphatic filariasis and onchocerciasis are neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) targeted for elimination by mass (antifilarial) drug administration. These drugs are predominantly active against the microfilarial progeny of adult worms. New drugs or combinations are needed to improve patient therapy and to enhance the effectiveness of interventions in persistent hotspots of transmission. Several therapies and regimens are currently in (pre-)clinical testing. Clinical trial simulators (CTSs) project patient outcomes to inform the design of clinical trials but have not been widely applied to NTDs, where their resource-saving payoffs could be highly beneficial. We demonstrate the utility of CTSs using our individual-based onchocerciasis transmission model (EPIONCHO-IBM) that projects trial outcomes of a hypothetical macrofilaricidal drug. We identify key design decisions that influence the power of clinical trials, including participant eligibility criteria and post-treatment follow-up times for measuring infection indicators. We discuss how CTSs help to inform target product profiles

View Maintenance and Change Notification for Application Program Views

Client applications usually hold (derived) subsets of the database contents under their control. The incremental maintenance of such externally materialized views is an important open problem. In addition to some necessary changes in the known view maintenance procedures the issue of translating updates through an API and away for clients to accept such updates have to be defined. This paper presents the properties of an incremental view maintenance procedure which is able to handle externally materialized views and is implemented in the deductive and object-oriented database system ConceptBase. In particular we describe the concepts for supporting direct modi#cations of data structures representing the materialized views on the client side