scholarly journals Canada’s rapid research response to the COVID-19 pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 50-67
Author(s):  
Vanja Stojanovic

This study assesses the nature of Canada’s rapid research response through term and keyword bibliometric analysis. The following asks: What are the major areas of COVID-19 rapid research output conducted in Canada during the first five and half months of 2020, and how can the results of this analysis inform future accelerated research efforts toward an effective response to infectious disease emergencies? The results suggest that infection prevention, epidemiology, therapeutics, and public health strategies were among the top-producing research areas in Canada during the onset of the pandemic. Moreover, the analysis reflects gaps in the literature addressing diagnostics and vaccine development.

Author(s):  
Carlos E. Galván-Tejada ◽  
Cintya Fabiola Herrera-García ◽  
Susana Godina-González ◽  
Karen E. Villagrana-Bañuelos ◽  
Juan Daniel De Luna Amaro ◽  
...  

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is responsible for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), a highly contagious infectious disease that has caused many deaths worldwide. Despite global efforts, it continues to cause great losses, and leaving multiple unknowns that we must resolve in order to face the pandemic more effectively. One of the questions that has arisen recently is what happens, after recovering from COVID-19. For this reason, the objective of this study is to identify the risk of presenting persistent symptoms in recovered from COVID-19. This case-control study was conducted in one state of Mexico. Initially the data were obtained from the participants, through a questionnaire about symptoms that they had at the moment of the interview. Initially were captured the collected data, to make a dataset. After the pre-processed using the R project tool to eliminate outliers or missing data. Obtained finally a total of 219 participants, 141 recovered and 78 controls. It was used confidence level of 90% and a margin of error of 7%. From results it was obtained that all symptoms have an associated risk in those recovered. The relative risk of the selected symptoms in the recovered patients goes from 3 to 22 times, being infinite for the case of dyspnea, due to the fact that there is no control that presents this symptom at the moment of the interview, followed by the nausea and the anosmia with a RR of 8.5. Therefore, public health strategies must be rethought, to treat or rehabilitate, avoiding chronic problems in patients recovered from COVID-19.


Author(s):  
Chunmei Cai ◽  
Zhiqiang Hu ◽  
Xiao Yu

Malaria is a life-threatening infectious disease, affecting over 250 million individuals worldwide each year, eradicating malaria has been one of the greatest challenges to public health for a century. Growing resistance to anti-parasitic therapies and lack of effective vaccines are major contributing factors in controlling this disease. However, the incomplete understanding of parasite interactions with host anti-malaria immunity hinders vaccine development efforts to date. Recent studies have been unveiling the complexity of immune responses and regulators against Plasmodium infection. Here, we summarize our current understanding of host immune responses against Plasmodium-derived components infection and mainly focus on the various regulatory mechanisms mediated by recent identified immune regulators orchestrating anti-malaria immunity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shane Babcock ◽  
John Beverley ◽  
Lindsay G. Cowell ◽  
Barry Smith

Abstract Background Effective response to public health emergencies, such as we are now experiencing with COVID-19, requires data sharing across multiple disciplines and data systems. Ontologies offer a powerful data sharing tool, and this holds especially for those ontologies built on the design principles of the Open Biomedical Ontologies Foundry. These principles are exemplified by the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO), a suite of interoperable ontology modules aiming to provide coverage of all aspects of the infectious disease domain. At its center is IDO Core, a disease- and pathogen-neutral ontology covering just those types of entities and relations that are relevant to infectious diseases generally. IDO Core is extended by disease and pathogen-specific ontology modules. Results To assist the integration and analysis of COVID-19 data, and viral infectious disease data more generally, we have recently developed three new IDO extensions: IDO Virus (VIDO); the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO); and an extension of CIDO focusing on COVID-19 (IDO-COVID-19). Reflecting the fact that viruses lack cellular parts, we have introduced into IDO Core the term acellular structure to cover viruses and other acellular entities studied by virologists. We now distinguish between infectious agents – organisms with an infectious disposition – and infectious structures – acellular structures with an infectious disposition. This in turn has led to various updates and refinements of IDO Core’s content. We believe that our work on VIDO, CIDO, and IDO-COVID-19 can serve as a model for yielding greater conformance with ontology building best practices. Conclusions IDO provides a simple recipe for building new pathogen-specific ontologies in a way that allows data about novel diseases to be easily compared, along multiple dimensions, with data represented by existing disease ontologies. The IDO strategy, moreover, supports ontology coordination, providing a powerful method of data integration and sharing that allows physicians, researchers, and public health organizations to respond rapidly and efficiently to current and future public health crises.


Author(s):  
Benjamin Roche ◽  
Hélène Broutin ◽  
Frédéric Simard

The objective of this book is to review the fundamental knowledge in ecology and evolution of infectious disease, as well as how it can be translated into opportunities to improve public health strategies in low-income countries, as well as in accounting and prompting for multisector interactions with the fields of economics, sociology and geopolitics, among others. The chapter explores challenges to applying the scientific knowledge for disease control, and it considers which disease to target. The chapter goes over the main recommendations arising from evolutionary ecology for infectious disease–control programs in low-income settings, and it highlights some crucial points that need to be considered to facilitate and accelerate integration of this fundamental knowledge to improve the efficiency of pathogen control.


Author(s):  
Priya Duggal ◽  
Gail Geller ◽  
Andrea Sutherland

This chapter outlines the ethical issues raised by the use of genomics in the study of infectious disease, in research and development of preventive and therapeutic measures, and to inform public health interventions and policies. More than two decades of ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) research on the application of genomics to complex diseases have produced many insights that are also relevant to infectious diseases; however, a number of factors unique to infectious diseases underscore the importance of identifying novel ELSI issues that might emerge from the application of genomics in this context, including issues surrounding personalized medicine and public health. While the science of genomics in the context of infectious disease is still in its infancy, and it is too early to identify all of the potential ELSI issues that may emerge from it, policy recommendations for public health strategies to prevent and control infectious disease must attend to such concerns.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 3414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ibrahim Musa ◽  
Hyun Park ◽  
Lkhagvadorj Munkhdalai ◽  
Keun Ryu

Syndromic Surveillance aims at analyzing medical data to detect clusters of illness or forecast disease outbreaks. Although the research in this field is flourishing in terms of publications, an insight of the global research output has been overlooked. This paper aims at analyzing the global scientific output of the research from 1993 to 2017. To this end, the paper uses bibliometric analysis and visualization to achieve its goal. Particularly, a data processing framework was proposed based on citation datasets collected from Scopus and Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC). The bibliometric method and Citespace were used to analyze the institutions, countries, and research areas as well as the current hotspots and trends. The preprocessed dataset includes 14,680 citation records. The analysis uncovered USA, England, Canada, France and Australia as the top five most productive countries publishing about Syndromic Surveillance. On the other hand, at the Pinnacle of academic institutions are the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The reference co-citation analysis uncovered the common research venues and further analysis of the keyword cooccurrence revealed the most trending topics. The findings of this research will help in enriching the field with a comprehensive view of the status and future trends of the research on Syndromic Surveillance.


Author(s):  
Wenting Yang ◽  
Jiantong Zhang ◽  
Ruolin Ma

Objective: The outbreak of infectious diseases has a negative influence on public health and the economy. The prediction of infectious diseases can effectively control large-scale outbreaks and reduce transmission of epidemics in rapid response to serious public health events. Therefore, experts and scholars are increasingly concerned with the prediction of infectious diseases. However, a knowledge mapping analysis of literature regarding the prediction of infectious diseases using rigorous bibliometric tools, which are supposed to offer further knowledge structure and distribution, has been conducted infrequently. Therefore, we implement a bibliometric analysis about the prediction of infectious diseases to objectively analyze the current status and research hotspots, in order to provide a reference for related researchers. Methods: We viewed “infectious disease*” and “prediction” or “forecasting” as search theme in the core collection of Web of Science from inception to 1 May 2020. We used two effective bibliometric tools, i.e., CiteSpace (Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA) and VOSviewer (Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands) to objectively analyze the data of the prediction of infectious disease domain based on related publications, which can be downloaded from the core collection of Web of Science. Then, the leading publications of the prediction of infectious diseases were identified to detect the historical progress based on collaboration analysis, co-citation analysis, and co-occurrence analysis. Results: 1880 documents that met the inclusion criteria were extracted from Web of Science in this study. The number of documents exhibited a growing trend, which can be expressed an increasing number of experts and scholars paying attention to the field year by year. These publications were published in 427 different journals with 11 different document types, and the most frequently studied types were articles 1618 (83%). In addition, as the most productive country, the United States has provided a lot of scientific research achievements in the field of infectious diseases. Conclusion: Our study provides a systematic and objective view of the field, which can be useful for readers to evaluate the characteristics of publications involving the prediction of infectious diseases and for policymakers to take timely scientific responses.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jingjing Ren ◽  
Qisheng Peng

: Brucellosis caused by bacteria of the genus of Brucella remains a major zoonosis in the widely world, which is an infectious disease with a severe economic impact on animal husbandry and public health. The genus of Brucella includes ten species and the most prevalent is Brucella melitensis. The diagnosis of Brucella melitensis ruminant brucellosis is based on bacteriological and immunological tests. The use of vaccines and the false-positive serological reactions (FPSR) caused by other cross-reacting bacteria represent the immunological contexts. This complex context results in the development of the large number of diagnosis of Brucella melitensis brucellosis. The aim of this article is to briefly review the detection methods and compare the superiorities of different tests.


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