Ready or Not? Protecting the Public's Health From Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism, 2008

Examines ten indicators to assess progress in state readiness to respond to bioterrorism and other public health emergencies. Evaluates the federal government's and hospitals' preparedness. Makes suggestions for funding, restructuring, and other reforms

Ready or Not? Protecting the Public's Health From Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism, 2011

Highlights examples of preparedness programs and capacities at risk of federal budget cuts or elimination, examines state and local public health budget cuts, reviews ten years of progress and shortfalls, and outlines policy issues and recommendations

Ready or Not? Protecting the Public's Health From Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism, 2009

Based on ten indicators, assesses progress in the readiness of states, federal government, and hospitals to respond to public health emergencies, with a focus on the H1N1 flu. Outlines improvements and concerns in funding, accountability, and other areas

What's unusual in online disease outbreak news?

Background: Accurate and timely detection of public health events of international concern is necessary to help support risk assessment and response and save lives. Novel event-based methods that use the World Wide Web as a signal source offer potential to extend health surveillance into areas where traditional indicator networks are lacking. In this paper we address the issue of systematically evaluating online health news to support automatic alerting using daily disease-country counts text mined from real world data using BioCaster. For 18 data sets produced by BioCaster, we compare 5 aberration detection algorithms (EARS C2, C3, W2, F-statistic and EWMA) for performance against expert moderated ProMED-mail postings. Results: We report sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), mean alerts/100 days and F1, at 95% confidence interval (CI) for 287 ProMED-mail postings on 18 outbreaks across 14 countries over a 366 day period. Results indicate that W2 had the best F1 with a slight benefit for day of week effect over C2. In drill down analysis we indicate issues arising from the granular choice of country-level modeling, sudden drops in reporting due to day of week effects and reporting bias. Automatic alerting has been implemented in BioCaster available from http://born.nii.ac.jp. Conclusions: Online health news alerts have the potential to enhance manual analytical methods by increasing throughput, timeliness and detection rates. Systematic evaluation of health news aberrations is necessary to push forward our understanding of the complex relationship between news report volumes and case numbers and to select the best performing features and algorithms

Biosurveillance: Detecting, Tracking, and Mitigating the Effects of Natural Disease and Bioterrorism

Encyclopedia of Operations Research and the Management Sciences, Cochran, J.J. (ed.), John Wiley & Sons Ltd.The article of record as published may be located at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9780470400531Biosurveillance is the regular collection, analysis, and interpretation of health and health related data for indicators of diseases and other outbreaks by public health organizations. Motivated by the threat of bioterrorism, biosurviellance systems are being developed and implemented around the world. The goal of these systems has been expanded to include both early event detection and situational awareness, so that the focus is not simply on detection, but also on response and consequence management. Whether they rae useful for detecting bioterrorism or not, there seems to be consensus that these biosurveillance systems are likely to be useful for detecting bioterrorism or not, there seems to be consensus that these biosurveillance systems are likely to be useful for detecting and responding to naural disease outbreaks such as seasonal and pandemic flu, and thus they have potential to significantly advance and modernize the practice of public health surveillance