scholarly journals DBatVir: the database of bat-associated viruses

Database ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lihong Chen ◽  
Bo Liu ◽  
Jian Yang ◽  
Qi Jin

Abstract Emerging infectious diseases remain a significant threat to public health. Most emerging infectious disease agents in humans are of zoonotic origin. Bats are important reservoir hosts of many highly lethal zoonotic viruses and have been implicated in numerous emerging infectious disease events in recent years. It is essential to enhance our knowledge and understanding of the genetic diversity of the bat-associated viruses to prevent future outbreaks. To facilitate further research, we constructed the database of bat-associated viruses (DBatVir). Known viral sequences detected in bat samples were manually collected and curated, along with the related metadata, such as the sampling time, location, bat species and specimen type. Additional information concerning the bats, including common names, diet type, geographic distribution and phylogeny were integrated into the database to bridge the gap between virologists and zoologists. The database currently covers >4100 bat-associated animal viruses of 23 viral families detected from 196 bat species in 69 countries worldwide. It provides an overview and snapshot of the current research regarding bat-associated viruses, which is essential now that the field is rapidly expanding. With a user-friendly interface and integrated online bioinformatics tools, DBatVir provides a convenient and powerful platform for virologists and zoologists to analyze the virome diversity of bats, as well as for epidemiologists and public health researchers to monitor and track current and future bat-related infectious diseases. Database URL: http://www.mgc.ac.cn/DBatVir/

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott B. Halstead

When the underlying causes and mechanisms of emerging infectious disease problems are studied carefully, human behaviour is often involved. Even more often, the only methods of control or prevention available are to change human behaviour. Several major recent emerging disease problems can be cited. It is sometimes emphasized that it is human carelessness, human excesses, human ignorance or human habits of conquest or leisure which contribute directly to the biological niches that microorganisms are all too capable of exploiting. We must look at ourselves as the engines of microbial opportunism. It is not likely that we will ever conquer the microbial world;we must look instead to control the human factors that contribute to emergence.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maneesha Chitanvis ◽  
Ashlynn Daughton ◽  
Forest M Altherr ◽  
Geoffery Fairchild ◽  
William Rosenberger ◽  
...  

Objective: Although relying on verbal definitions of "re-emergence", descriptions that classify a “re-emergence” event as any significant recurrence of a disease that had previously been under public health control, and subjective interpretations of these events is currently the conventional practice, this has the potential to hinder effective public health responses. Defining re-emergence in this manner offers limited ability for ad hoc analysis of prevention and control measures and facilitates non-reproducible assessments of public health events of potentially high consequence. Re-emerging infectious disease alert (RED Alert) is a decision-support tool designed to address this issue by enhancing situational awareness by providing spatiotemporal context through disease incidence pattern analysis following an event that may represent a local (country-level) re-emergence. The tool’s analytics also provide users with the associated causes (socioeconomic indicators) related to the event, and guide hypothesis-generation regarding the global scenario.Introduction: Definitions of “re-emerging infectious diseases” typically encompass any disease occurrence that was a historic public health threat, declined dramatically, and has since presented itself again as a significant health problem. Examples include antimicrobial resistance leading to resurgence of tuberculosis, or measles re-appearing in previously protected communities. While the language of this verbal definition of “re-emergence” is sensitive enough to capture most epidemiologically relevant resurgences, its qualitative nature obfuscates the ability to quantitatively classify disease re-emergence events as such.Methods: Our tool automatically computes historic disease incidence and performs trend analyses to help elucidate events which a user may considered a true re-emergence in a subset of pertinent infectious diseases (measles, cholera, yellow fever, and dengue). The tool outputs data visualizations that illustrate incidence trends in diverse and informative ways. Additionally, we categorize location and incidence-specific indicators for re-emergence to provide users with associated indicators as well as justifications and documentation to guide users’ next steps. Additionally, the tool also houses interactive maps to facilitate global hypothesis-generation.Results: These outputs provide historic trend pattern analyses as well as contextualization of the user’s situation with similar locations. The tool also broadens users' understanding of the given situation by providing related indicators of the likely re-emergence, as well as the ability to investigate re-emergence factors of global relevance through spatial analysis and data visualization.Conclusions: The inability to categorically name a re-emergence event as such is due to lack of standardization and/or availability of reproducible, data-based evidence, and hinders timely and effective public health response and planning. While the tool will not explicitly call out a user scenario as categorically re-emergent or not, by providing users with context in both time and space, RED Alert aims to empower users with data and analytics in order to substantially enhance their contextual awareness; thus, better enabling them to formulate plans of action regarding re-emerging infectious disease threats at both the country and global level.


2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chacha D. Mangu ◽  
Christina K. Manyama ◽  
Henry Msila ◽  
Lwitiho Sudi ◽  
Godlove Chaula ◽  
...  

Emerging diseases are global threat towards human existence. Every country is exposed to potentially emergence of infectious diseases. Several factor such as changes in ecology, climate and human demographics play different roles in a complex mechanism contributing to the occurrence of infectious diseases. Important aspects towards control in case of outbreaks are surveillance, preparedness and early response. Tanzania should therefore take opportunity of the calm situation currently present, to prepare. Except for HIV/AIDS, Tanzania has not experienced a major public health threat. However, the question is, is the country safe from emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases? In this article we try to explore the danger of emerging infectious disease (EID) epidemics in Tanzania and the risks attached if an outbreak is to occur. The aim is to formulate recommendations to the government, responsible authorities and general population of what can be done to improve the level of EID preparedness in the country. In conclusion, it is important to strengthen the capacity of community and healthcare staffs on how to respond to potential infectious disease outbreaks. Community-based surveillance systems should be incorporated into the national systems for early detection of public health events. It is also critical to enhance one health approach to increase cross-sectoral information sharing, surveillance and interventional strategies as regards to preparedness and response to disease outbreaks.


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-22
Author(s):  
Hea-Jin Moon ◽  
Ju Young Park

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify the effect of nurses' nursing professionalism, moral sensitivity, and social support on intention to care for patients with emerging infectious diseases.Methods: A structured self-report questionnaire was used to measure nursing professionalism, moral sensitivity, social support, and intention to care for patients with emerging infectious diseases. Data were collected from April 9~20, 2019. Participants were 200 nurse nurses working in national and public hospitals. Data were analyzed using Pearson correlation coefficients, and Multiple regression with the SPSS/WIN 24.0 program.Results: The perceived behavioral control (β=.48, p<.001), control beliefs (β=-.26, p<.001), moral sensitivity (β=.23, p<.001), normative beliefs (β=.17, p=.002), subjective norms (β=.17, p=.001), and attitude toward behavior (β=.10, p=.036) were a significant predictor of the intention to care for emerging infectious disease patients (Adj. R<sup>2</sup>=.65).Conclusion: In order to confidently carry out nursing activities for patients with emerging infectious diseases, sufficient education on the epidemiological characteristics of emerging infectious diseases must be provided and education programs developed and applied with simulation similar to those of actual care for emerging infectious disease patients.


2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (2_suppl) ◽  
pp. 16S-21S ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Villanueva ◽  
Beth Schweitzer ◽  
Marcella Odle ◽  
Tricia Aden

The Laboratory Response Network (LRN) was established in 1999 to ensure an effective laboratory response to high-priority public health threats. The LRN for biological threats (LRN-B) provides a laboratory infrastructure to respond to emerging infectious diseases. Since 2012, the LRN-B has been involved in 3 emerging infectious disease outbreak responses. We evaluated the LRN-B role in these responses and identified areas for improvement. LRN-B laboratories tested 1097 specimens during the 2014 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus outbreak, 180 specimens during the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak, and 92 686 specimens during the 2016-2017 Zika virus outbreak. During the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak, the LRN-B uncovered important gaps in biosafety and biosecurity practices. During the 2016-2017 Zika outbreak, the LRN-B identified the data entry bottleneck as a hindrance to timely reporting of results. Addressing areas for improvement may help LRN-B reference laboratories improve the response to future public health emergencies.


2017 ◽  
Vol 145 (10) ◽  
pp. 2053-2061 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. JEONG ◽  
C. S. SMITH ◽  
A. J. PEEL ◽  
R. K. PLOWRIGHT ◽  
D. H. KERLIN ◽  
...  

SUMMARYUnderstanding viral transmission dynamics within populations of reservoir hosts can facilitate greater knowledge of the spillover of emerging infectious diseases. While bat-borne viruses are of concern to public health, investigations into their dynamics have been limited by a lack of longitudinal data from individual bats. Here, we examine capture–mark–recapture (CMR) data from a species of Australian bat (Myotis macropus) infected with a putative novel Alphacoronavirus within a Bayesian framework. Then, we developed epidemic models to estimate the effect of persistently infectious individuals (which shed viruses for extensive periods) on the probability of viral maintenance within the study population. We found that the CMR data analysis supported grouping of infectious bats into persistently and transiently infectious bats. Maintenance of coronavirus within the study population was more likely in an epidemic model that included both persistently and transiently infectious bats, compared with the epidemic model with non-grouping of bats. These findings, using rare CMR data from longitudinal samples of individual bats, increase our understanding of transmission dynamics of bat viral infectious diseases.


2003 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 38
Author(s):  
John S Mackenzie ◽  
Lisa Adams

The Australian Biosecurity Cooperative Research Centre for Emerging Infectious Disease (AB-CRC) was a successful applicant under the Federal Government?s 2002 CRC programme, and will be formally established from July 2003. The aim of the AB-CRC is to protect Australia?s health, livestock, wildlife and economic resources by developing new capabilities to monitor, assess, predict and respond to emerging and exotic disease threats which impact on national and regional biosecurity. Emerging diseases are defined as those which are novel, previously unrecognised diseases, or those which are increasing in incidence or geographic range. The threats may be natural, accidental (such as an infected traveller) or deliberate (as in bioterrorism).


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Juhyeon Kim ◽  
Insung Ahn

AbstractWhen a newly emerging infectious disease breaks out in a country, it brings critical damage to both human health conditions and the national economy. For this reason, apprehending which disease will newly emerge, and preparing countermeasures for that disease, are required. Many different types of infectious diseases are emerging and threatening global human health conditions. For this reason, the detection of emerging infectious disease pattern is critical. However, as the epidemic spread of infectious disease occurs sporadically and rapidly, it is not easy to predict whether an infectious disease will emerge or not. Furthermore, accumulating data related to a specific infectious disease is not easy. For these reasons, finding useful data and building a prediction model with these data is required. The Internet press releases numerous articles every day that rapidly reflect currently pending issues. Thus, in this research, we accumulated Internet articles from Medisys that were related to infectious disease, to see if news data could be used to predict infectious disease outbreak. Articles related to infectious disease from January to December 2019 were collected. In this study, we evaluated if newly emerging infectious diseases could be detected using the news article data. Support Vector Machine (SVM), Semi-supervised Learning (SSL), and Deep Neural Network (DNN) were used for prediction to examine the use of information embedded in the web articles: and to detect the pattern of emerging infectious disease.


Author(s):  
Aggrey Siya ◽  
Richardson Mafigiri ◽  
Richard Migisha ◽  
Rebekah C. Kading

In mountain communities like Sebei, Uganda, which are highly vulnerable to emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, community-based surveillance plays an important role in the monitoring of public health hazards. In this survey, we explored capacities of village health teams (VHTs) in Sebei communities of Mount Elgon in undertaking surveillance tasks for emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases in the context of a changing climate. We used participatory epidemiology techniques to elucidate VHTs’ perceptions on climate change and public health and assessed their capacities to conduct surveillance for emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. Overall, VHTs perceived climate change to be occurring with wider impacts on public health. However, they had inadequate capacities in collecting surveillance data. The VHTs lacked transport to navigate through their communities and had insufficient capacities in using mobile phones for sending alerts. They did not engage in reporting other hazards related to the environment, wildlife, and domestic livestock that would accelerate infectious disease outbreaks. Records were not maintained for disease surveillance activities and the abilities of VHTs to analyze data were also limited. However, VHTs had access to platforms that could enable them to disseminate public health information. The VHTs thus need to be retooled to conduct their work effectively and efficiently through equipping them with adequate logistics and knowledge on collecting, storing, analyzing, and relaying data, which will improve infectious disease response and mitigation efforts.


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