Characterizing the transmission patterns of seasonal influenza in Italy: lessons from the last decade

Abstract Background Despite thousands of influenza cases annually recorded by surveillance systems around the globe, estimating the transmission patterns of seasonal influenza is challenging. Methods We develop an age-structured mathematical model to influenza transmission to analyze ten consecutive seasons (from 2010 to 2011 to 2019–2020) of influenza epidemiological and virological data reported to the Italian surveillance system. Results We estimate that 18.4–29.3% of influenza infections are detected by the surveillance system. Influenza infection attack rate varied between 12.7 and 30.5% and is generally larger for seasons characterized by the circulation of A/H3N2 and/or B types/subtypes. Individuals aged 14 years or less are the most affected age-segment of the population, with A viruses especially affecting children aged 0–4 years. For all influenza types/subtypes, the mean effective reproduction number is estimated to be generally in the range 1.09–1.33 (9 out of 10 seasons) and never exceeding 1.41. The age-specific susceptibility to infection appears to be a type/subtype-specific feature. Conclusions The results presented in this study provide insights on type/subtype-specific transmission patterns of seasonal influenza that could be instrumental to fine-tune immunization strategies and non-pharmaceutical interventions aimed at limiting seasonal influenza spread and burden.

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Characterizing the transmission patterns of seasonal influenza in Italy: lessons from the last decade

10.1101/2020.11.29.20240457 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Filippo Trentini ◽

Elena Pariani ◽

Antonino Bella ◽

Giulio Diurno ◽

Lucia Crottogini ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Surveillance System ◽

Seasonal Influenza ◽

Influenza Infection ◽

Surveillance Systems ◽

Susceptibility To Infection ◽

Immunization Strategies ◽

The Mean ◽

Influenza Transmission ◽

Age Structured ◽

Fine Tune

AbstractBackgroundDespite thousands of influenza cases annually recorded by surveillance systems around the globe, estimating the transmission patterns of seasonal influenza is challenging.MethodsWe develop an age-structured mathematical model to influenza transmission to analyze ten consecutive seasons (from 2010-2011 to 2019-2020) of influenza epidemiological and virological data reported to the Italian surveillance system.ResultsWe estimate that 18.4%-29.3% of influenza infections are detected by the surveillance system. Influenza infection attack rate varied between 18.0% and 35.6% and is generally larger for seasons characterized by the circulation of A/H3N2 and/or B types/subtypes. Individuals aged 14 years or less are the most affected age-segment of the population, with A viruses especially affecting children aged 0-4 years. For all influenza types/subtypes, the mean effective reproduction number is estimated to be generally in the range 1.1-1.4 (8 out of 10 seasons) and never exceeding 1.55. The age-specific susceptibility to infection appears to be a type/subtype-specific feature.ConclusionsThe results presented in this study provide insights on type/subtype-specific transmission patterns of seasonal influenza that could be instrumental to fine-tune immunization strategies and non-pharmaceutical interventions aimed at limiting seasonal influenza spread and burden.

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The epidemiology of infectious syphilis in the Republic of Ireland

Eurosurveillance ◽

10.2807/esm.09.12.00495-en ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 9 (12) ◽

pp. 11-12 ◽

Cited By ~ 19

Author(s):

M Cronin ◽

L Domegan ◽

L Thornton ◽

M Fitzgerald ◽

S Hopkins ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Surveillance System ◽

Oral Sex ◽

Surveillance Systems ◽

Anal Sex ◽

The Mean ◽

The Republic ◽

Sex With Men ◽

Set Up ◽

Time Evaluation ◽

Ongoing Monitoring

In response to the increasing numbers of syphilis cases reported among men having sex with men (MSM) in Dublin, an Outbreak Control Team (OCT) was set up in late 2000. The outbreak peaked in 2001 and had largely ceased by late 2003. An enhanced syphilis surveillance system was introduced to capture data from January 2000. Between January 2000 and December 2003, 547 cases of infectious syphilis were notified in Ireland (415 were MSM). Four per cent of cases were diagnosed with HIV and 15.4% of cases were diagnosed with at least one other STI (excluding HIV) within the previous 3 months. The mean number of contacts reported by male cases in the 3 months prior to diagnosis was 4 (range 0-8) for bisexual contacts and 6 for homosexual contacts (range 1-90). Thirty one per cent of MSM reported having had recent unprotected oral sex and 15.9% of MSM reported having had recent unprotected anal sex. Sixteen per cent of cases reported having had sex abroad in the three months prior to diagnosis. The results suggest that risky sexual behaviour contributed to the onward transmission of infection in Dublin. The outbreak in Dublin could be seen as part of a European-wide outbreak of syphilis. The rates of co-infection with HIV and syphilis in Ireland are comparable with rates reported from other centres. There is a need to improve surveillance systems in order to allow real time evaluation of interventions and ongoing monitoring of infection trends.

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Preventive and protective measures reducing influenza transmission in general practice: a systematic review

BJGP Open ◽

10.3399/bjgpopen19x101657 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 (3) ◽

pp. bjgpopen19X101657 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Philipp Suter ◽

Tessa Kermode ◽

Carole Clair ◽

Yolanda Mueller ◽

Nicolas Senn

Keyword(s):

Systematic Review ◽

Seasonal Influenza ◽

Controlled Trial ◽

Influenza Infection ◽

Experimental Studies ◽

Cochrane Central Register ◽

Protective Measures ◽

Protection Measures ◽

Influenza Transmission ◽

The Impact

BackgroundSeasonal influenza and influenza-like illnesses are widespread, with an impact on GP consultations. GPs apply many preventive and protective measures to prevent seasonal influenza transmission, with no clear evidence of their effectiveness in this setting.AimTo review the effectiveness of preventive and protective measures to reduce the transmission of seasonal influenza and influenza-like illnesses in GP practices.Design & settingA systematic review was conducted of the literature in Medline, Embase, and the Cochrane Central Register databases published between January 1960 and April 2014, later extended to January 2018.MethodPreferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) criteria were used. Controlled trials and experimental studies were included. Study quality was assessed according to the Cochrane risk of bias tool.ResultsOut of 5727 articles screened, only two studies were finally retained: one study about the seasonal influenza vaccination of GPs to prevent transmission from patients or staff, and one about surface disinfection. The first study was a controlled trial, which showed limited evidence for seasonal influenza infection reduction among GPs through vaccination. The second, an experimental study, performed a virus screening on toys in the waiting area before and after disinfection. No study on protection measures was found that assessed the impact on influenza transmission in general practices.ConclusionThe evidence is scarce on interventions that reduce influenza transmission in GP practices.

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Different Transmission Dynamics of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and Influenza Suggest the Relative Efficiency of Isolation/Quarantine and Social Distancing Against COVID-19 in China

Clinical Infectious Diseases ◽

10.1093/cid/ciaa1584 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Hao Lei ◽

Xifeng Wu ◽

Xiao Wang ◽

Modi Xu ◽

Yu Xie ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Relative Efficiency ◽

Seasonal Influenza ◽

Basic Reproductive Number ◽

Reproductive Number ◽

Social Distancing ◽

Relative Age ◽

Age Dependent ◽

The Mean ◽

Age Structured ◽

Nonpharmaceutical Interventions

Abstract Background Nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are vital to reducing transmission risks. However, the relative efficiency of social distancing against COVID-19 remains controversial, since social distancing and isolation/quarantine were implemented almost at the same time in China. Methods In this study, surveillance data of COVID-19 and seasonal influenza in 2018–2020 were used to quantify the relative efficiency of NPIs against COVID-19 in China, since isolation/quarantine was not used for the influenza epidemics. Given that the relative age-dependent susceptibility to influenza and COVID-19 may vary, an age-structured susceptible/infected/recovered model was built to explore the efficiency of social distancing against COVID-19 under different population susceptibility scenarios. Results The mean effective reproductive number, Rt, of COVID-19 before NPIs was 2.12 (95% confidence interval [CI], 2.02–2.21). By 11 March 2020, the overall reduction in Rt of COVID-19 was 66.1% (95% CI, 60.1–71.2%). In the epidemiological year 2019–20, influenza transmissibility was reduced by 34.6% (95% CI, 31.3–38.2%) compared with transmissibility in epidemiological year 2018–19. Under the observed contact pattern changes in China, social distancing had similar efficiency against COVID-19 in 3 different scenarios. By assuming the same efficiency of social distancing against seasonal influenza and COVID-19 transmission, isolation/quarantine and social distancing could lead to 48.1% (95% CI, 35.4–58.1%) and 34.6% (95% CI, 31.3–38.2%) reductions of the transmissibility of COVID-19, respectively. Conclusions Though isolation/quarantine is more effective than social distancing, given that the typical basic reproductive number of COVID-19 is 2–3, isolation/quarantine alone could not contain the COVID-19 pandemic effectively in China.

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Vector Borne Infections in Italy: Results of the Integrated Surveillance System for West Nile Disease in 2013

BioMed Research International ◽

10.1155/2015/643439 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 2015 ◽

pp. 1-8 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Christian Napoli ◽

Simona Iannetti ◽

Caterina Rizzo ◽

Antonino Bella ◽

Daria Di Sabatino ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Surveillance System ◽

Ecological Factors ◽

Surveillance Systems ◽

West Nile ◽

The Public ◽

Health Authorities ◽

Public Health Authorities ◽

Vector Borne ◽

Human Side ◽

Fine Tune

The epidemiology of West Nile disease (WND) is influenced by multiple ecological factors and, therefore, integrated surveillance systems are needed for early detecting the infection and activating consequent control actions. As different animal species have different importance in the maintenance and in the spread of the infection, a multispecies surveillance approach is required. An integrated and comprehensive surveillance system is in place in Italy aiming at early detecting the virus introduction, monitoring the possible infection spread, and implementing preventive measures for human health. This paper describes the integrated surveillance system for WND in Italy, which incorporates data from veterinary and human side in order to evaluate the burden of infection in animals and humans and provide the public health authorities at regional and national levels with the information needed for a fine tune response.

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Derivation of New Surveillance System for Influenza-like Illness Using Claims Data 2014-2018 in Korea (Preprint)

10.2196/preprints.25155 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

HeeKyung Choi ◽

Won Suk Choi ◽

Euna Han

Keyword(s):

Surveillance System ◽

Claims Data ◽

Health Concern ◽

Influenza Surveillance ◽

Utilization Review ◽

Surveillance Systems ◽

Influenza Like Illness ◽

System P ◽

National Patient ◽

Antitussive Agents

BACKGROUND Influenza is an important public health concern. A national surveillance system that easily and rapidly detects influenza epidemics is lacking. OBJECTIVE We assumed that the rate of influenza-like illness (ILI) related-claims is similar to the current ILI surveillance system. METHODS We used the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service-National Patient Samples (HIRA-NPS), 2014-2018. We defined ILI-related claims as outpatient claims that contain both antipyretic and antitussive agents and calculated the weekly rate of ILI-related claims. We compared ILI-related claims and weekly ILI rates from clinical sentinel surveillance data. RESULTS We observed a strong correlation between the two surveillance systems each season. The absolute thresholds for the four-years were 84.64 and 86.19 cases claims per 1,000 claims for claims data and 12.27 and 16.82 per 1,000 patients for sentinel data (Figure 5). Both the claims and sentinel data surpassed the epidemic thresholds each season. The peak epidemic in the claims data was reached one to two weeks later than in the sentinel data. The epidemic patterns were more similar in the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 seasons than the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 seasons. CONCLUSIONS Based on hospital reports, ILI-related claims rates were similar to the ILI surveillance system. ILI claims data can be loaded to a drug utilization review system in Korea to make an influenza surveillance system.

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Secure Video Surveillance Framework in Smart City

Sensors ◽

10.3390/s21134419 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 21 (13) ◽

pp. 4419

Author(s):

Hao Li ◽

Tianhao Xiezhang ◽

Cheng Yang ◽

Lianbing Deng ◽

Peng Yi

Keyword(s):

Video Surveillance ◽

Smart City ◽

Key Management ◽

Surveillance System ◽

Chinese Remainder Theorem ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Group Key Management ◽

Video Surveillance System ◽

Surveillance Systems ◽

Key Update

In the construction process of smart cities, more and more video surveillance systems have been deployed for traffic, office buildings, shopping malls, and families. Thus, the security of video surveillance systems has attracted more attention. At present, many researchers focus on how to select the region of interest (RoI) accurately and then realize privacy protection in videos by selective encryption. However, relatively few researchers focus on building a security framework by analyzing the security of a video surveillance system from the system and data life cycle. By analyzing the surveillance video protection and the attack surface of a video surveillance system in a smart city, we constructed a secure surveillance framework in this manuscript. In the secure framework, a secure video surveillance model is proposed, and a secure authentication protocol that can resist man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM) and replay attacks is implemented. For the management of the video encryption key, we introduced the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) on the basis of group key management to provide an efficient and secure key update. In addition, we built a decryption suite based on transparent encryption to ensure the security of the decryption environment. The security analysis proved that our system can guarantee the forward and backward security of the key update. In the experiment environment, the average decryption speed of our system can reach 91.47 Mb/s, which can meet the real-time requirement of practical applications.

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Surveillance System in Smart Cities: A Dependability Evaluation Based on Stochastic Models

Electronics ◽

10.3390/electronics10080876 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (8) ◽

pp. 876

Author(s):

Igor Gonçalves ◽

Laécio Rodrigues ◽

Francisco Airton Silva ◽

Tuan Anh Nguyen ◽

Dugki Min ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Surveillance System ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Heterogeneous Data ◽

Time To Failure ◽

Video Streams ◽

Dependability Evaluation ◽

The Mean ◽

Mean Time ◽

The Internet Of Things

Surveillance monitoring systems are highly necessary, aiming to prevent many social problems in smart cities. The internet of things (IoT) nowadays offers a variety of technologies to capture and process massive and heterogeneous data. Due to the fact that (i) advanced analyses of video streams are performed on powerful recording devices; while (ii) surveillance monitoring services require high availability levels in the way that the service must remain connected, for example, to a connection network that offers higher speed than conventional connections; and that (iii) the trust-worthy dependability of a surveillance system depends on various factors, it is not easy to identify which components/devices in a system architecture have the most impact on the dependability for a specific surveillance system in smart cities. In this paper, we developed stochastic Petri net models for a surveillance monitoring system with regard to varying several parameters to obtain the highest dependability. Two main metrics of interest in the dependability of a surveillance system including reliability and availability were analyzed in a comprehensive manner. The analysis results show that the variation in the number of long-term evolution (LTE)-based stations contributes to a number of nines (#9s) increase in availability. The obtained results show that the variation of the mean time to failure (MTTF) of surveillance cameras exposes a high impact on the reliability of the system. The findings of this work have the potential of assisting system architects in planning more optimized systems in this field based on the proposed models.

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Seasonal Influenza and Low Flu Vaccination Coverage as Important Factors Modifying the Costs and Availability of Hospital Services in Poland: A Retrospective Comparative Study

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health ◽

10.3390/ijerph18105173 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 18 (10) ◽

pp. 5173

Author(s):

Robert Susło ◽

Piotr Pobrotyn ◽

Lidia Brydak ◽

Łukasz Rypicz ◽

Urszula Grata-Borkowska ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Influenza Season ◽

Influenza Infection ◽

Hospital Staff ◽

University Hospital ◽

Control Group ◽

Admission Rates ◽

Risk Of Death ◽

The Mean ◽

Retrospective Comparative Study ◽

The Cost

Introduction: Influenza infection is associated with potential serious complications, increased hospitalization rates, and a higher risk of death. Materials and Methods: A retrospective comparative analysis of selected indicators of hospitalization from the University Hospital in Wroclaw, Poland, was carried out on patients with confirmed influenza infection in comparison to a control group randomly selected from among all other patients hospitalized on the respective wards during the 2018–2019 influenza season. Results: The mean laboratory testing costs for the entire hospital were 3.74-fold higher and the mean imaging test costs were 4.02-fold higher for patients with confirmed influenza than for the control group; the hospital expenses were additionally raised by the cost of antiviral therapy, which is striking when compared against the cost of a single flu vaccine. During the 2018–2019 influenza season, influenza infections among the hospital patients temporarily limited the healthcare service availability in the institution, which resulted in reduced admission rates to the departments related to internal medicine; the mean absence among the hospital staff totaled approximately 7 h per employee, despite 7.3% of the staff having been vaccinated against influenza at the hospital’s expense. Conclusions: There were significant differences in the hospitalization indicators between the patients with confirmed influenza and the control group, which markedly increased the hospital care costs in this multi-specialty university hospital.

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