Declaring an emergency is a dirty work, but someone has to do it. When facing a serious threat to global public health, even if complete evidence is lacking, someone has to take the responsibility to push the red button that activates a chain of coordinated actions (such as cooperation among states and research on vaccines). Choosing to do this, the risk of giving a false alarm is unavoidable.
The Zika virus has been recently identified in Europe after having spread in Brazil, where its first infection was confirmed in March 2015. Despite being relatively mild, this virus is now making headlines, as it could be responsible of a large increase of microcephaly among infants. A connection that pushed Brazil to declare Zika a public health emergency.
During the 2009 A(H1N1) pandemic, the issue of how many deaths were associated to the emerging virus was one of the main causes of misunderstanding between authorities and the general public, which ended in a worrying lack of trust. The pandemic, initially presented as a potential serious threat, in the end was no more severe than a common seasonal flu. Unfortunately, even nowadays, it is difficult to ascertain if and how much H1N1 pandemic was different from any other seasonal flu, based on official data.
The 17th International Congress on Infectious Diseases (ICID) will encompass all aspects of infectious diseases with particular attention to the major challenges in the South Asia region (such as HIV, tuberculosis, pneumonia and the enteric infections typhoid fever and diarrhea) and a focus on disease prevention and vaccination. In addition, the significant challenges of neglected tropical diseases will be discussed.
Epidemics 5 will bring together international delegates for three days of intense dialogue on ideas, data, insight, models and methods in the field of infectious disease dynamics. Invited plenary speakers will lead a topical programme supplemented by around 80 contributed oral presentations and lively and stimulating poster sessions. A short course "Using genomic data to uncover the dynamics of infectious diseases" will take place on December 1, in advance of the main conference.
This meeting is organized by The International Society of Influenza and Respiratory Viruses (isirv). It aims to bring together more than 150 international scientists, health care professionals, and public health officials to discuss the assessment of the impact of epidemics of influenza and other respiratory viruses, including the incidence of infections, the clinical severity of infections, and the consequent burden of morbidity and mortality.
Ministers and senior representatives of Member States in the European Region will meet to discuss the numerous public health challenges posed by large-scale movements of refugees and migrants to transit and destination countries. These range from management of communicable and noncommunicable diseases to the impact of large-scale migration on health systems. Given the inter-regional relevance of this topic, ministers from the main countries of origin and of transit of refugees and migrants – in the Eastern Mediterranean and African regions – are also invited.
The 2015 ESCAIDE conference will take place on 11-13 November 2015. It will be hosted at the Stockholm Waterfront Congress Centre, in the heart of the city. The ESCAIDE programme will offer a huge range of exciting presentations, posters, seminars and workshops on all aspects of infectious disease prevention and control.
From August 30 to September 5, the “Ettore Majorana” Centre for Scientific Culture in Erice hosted the “Mathematical and Computational Epidemiology of Infectious diseases” international conference. Aim of this event was to illustrate the major areas of research in mathematical and computational modelling of the spread of infectious diseases, and the huge variety of tools and approaches that are currently employed.
Monitoring health on a large scale through Big Data or using social networks to modify behaviour and risk factors are two relevant examples of how cutting edge technology may provide new and powerful tools against infectious diseases.
Many public and private agencies and bodies gather data from social networks and search engines to try and identify health emergencies and solve the problem: the most common approach is to analyze the search strings used by Google and the texts of blogs, forums and other pages on the Net.
