Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

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Chikungunya Has Sickened More Than 10,000 In Puerto Rico

Liz Szabo and Karen Weintraub | USA Today | December 4, 2014

It's an unfamiliar tropical virus with an exotic name that causes painful symptoms and has no known treatment or vaccine. It's spreading in the USA...

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Citing Anthrax And Smallpox Scares, White House Tells Federal Labs To Take Stock

Rebecca Carroll | Nextgov.com | August 28, 2014

After recent mishandling of potentially deadly pathogens, the White House is urging all federal laboratories to conduct what it is calling a “safety stand-down,” security and science officials announced Thursday.  Agencies that handle infectious agents or toxins have been asked to complete overviews of their programs within 30 days of a memo dated Aug. 18...

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Clade X pandemic exercise highlights policies needed to prevent or reduce the worst possible outcomes in future pandemics

Press Release | Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security | May 15, 2018

The outbreak of a moderately contagious and moderately lethal novel pathogen precipitated a catastrophic end to the scenario in Clade X, the day-long pandemic tabletop exercise hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security on May 15 in Washington, DC. Clade X simulated a series of National Security Council–convened meetings of 10 US government leaders, played by individuals prominent in the fields of national security or epidemic response. Their dialogue as the scenario unfolded addressed significant uncertainties in current prevention and response capabilities, hamstrung by policy challenges at the federal level.

Clinical Decision Support Strategies for Electronic Case Reporting and its Open Source Connection

A key element of public health surveillance is the reporting of infectious and certain non-infectious conditions to state, local, and tribal public health agencies (PHA) around the United States. Historically, there have been a number of key challenges with the process of case reporting that is pervasive in the United States today. To help overcome some of these barriers, an effort has been underway to move the process of case reporting to electronic. A key component of the emerging electronic care reporting (eCR) strategy is the use of clinical decision support (CDS) to help clinical care organizations determine if a reportable condition is present in a patient's record. Multiple approaches have been identified for this CDS service, including a centralized model being implemented today, and several distributed options which will likely become equally viable. Given the size, diversity, and decentralized nature of healthcare enterprises, it is likely that all three approaches for CDS discussed in this article will be deployed simultaneously.

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Collaborative Creates Model For Reporting To State Cancer Surveillance Registry

Marla Durben Hirsch | FierceEMR | August 12, 2014

...The collaborative effort by the Kentucky state public health department, the University of Kentucky, and the Kentucky Regional Extension Center (REC) used the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Replicating Effective Programs model to disseminate cancer therapy data from oncology practices in the state to a cancer surveillance registry. The project's work plan included recruiting practices and vendors, clinical management and staffing....

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Dallas Hospital Had The Ebola Screening Machine That The Military Is Using In Africa

Patrick Tucker | Nextgov.com | October 17, 2014

The military is using an Ebola screening machine that could have diagnosed the Ebola cases in Texas far faster, but government guidelines prevent hospitals from using it to actually screen for Ebola...

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Data Management for Large-scale COVID-19 Immunization: This is all not as simple as it seems

There is a global race for the development of a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. Finding a vaccine that works and receives approval is only part of the process. There are a series of other steps that need to be taken so that the vaccine can be delivered. These include the mass production of the vaccine, shipment, administration and record-keeping. This may be even more complex as there may be several vaccines. In this article we review some of these issues with a particular focus on the United States.

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Data Sharing And Analytics: Changing HHS For The Better

Adam Stone | Government Technology | January 9, 2015

In many states, IT planners in health and human services have sought ways to bridge the divide, gathering data from disparate sources across government to inform the public, drive better policy and improve social outcomes...

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Deaths By Medical Mistakes Hit Records

Erin McCann | Healthcare IT News | July 18, 2014

It's a chilling reality – one often overlooked in annual mortality statistics: Preventable medical errors persist as the No. 3 killer in the U.S. – third only to heart disease and cancer – claiming the lives of some 400,000 people each year...

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Decoding Superbug Evolution

Randall Mayes | Design & Trend | September 26, 2014

The spread of antibiotic-resistance pathogens and hospital-related infections have become a serious threat.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on any given day, about one in 25 hospital patients has at least one such infection, and as many as one in nine die as a result, reports ScienceDaily...

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Deconstructing the CDC’s ‘Snapshot’ Estimates

Ryan McNeill | Reuters | September 7, 2016

In 2013, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released estimates of how many people in the country die every year from antibiotic resistant infections: 23,000. The agency estimates that an additional 15,000 die annually from Clostridium difficile, an infection linked to long-term antibiotic use. The estimates, the agency said at the time, provided the “first snapshot of the burden and threats posed by antibiotic-resistant germs having the most impact on human health”...

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Disease Detectives Are Solving Fewer Foodborne Illness Cases

Eliza Barclay | The Salt | April 7, 2014

Recall, if you will, some of the biggest foodborne illness outbreaks of the past decade. There was the nasty of listeria from cantaloupe in 2011 that killed 33 people. And the ugly Salmonella Heidelberg from Foster Farms chicken [...] But according to a released Monday by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been reporting and solving fewer and fewer outbreaks over the past decade. Read More »

Do The CDC’s Ebola Precautions For U.S. Hospitals Go Far Enough?

Steven Ross Johnson | Modern Healthcare | August 21, 2014

U.S. hospitals have gone on alert since two American healthcare workers were brought to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta this month after being infected with the Ebola virus while treating Ebola patients in West Africa...

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Does Gum Disease Have a Link to Cancer, Dementia, Stroke?

Suzanne Allard Levingston | The Washington Post | October 1, 2016

Open wide. There’s a host of researchers peering inside your mouth, and you may be surprised at what they hope to find. They’re looking for a connection between gum disease and illnesses such as breast cancer and even dementia. What they’re seeing in there is intriguing: possible relationships between gum or periodontal disease and diabetes, heart disease, stroke and at-risk pregnancies. Some studies have been pursuing an association between bleeding gums and pancreatic cancer. Others are looking at whether there’s a connection between mouth bacteria and Alzheimer’s...

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Drug-resistant Superbugs Could Become Deadlier than Cancer

Ilene MacDonald | Fierce Healthcare | April 18, 2016

Superbugs are on track to kill 10 million people a year by 2050--more than those who die from cancer, warned UK Chancellor George Osborne, who urged for global and radical action to fight the threat from bacteria that have become resistant to antibiotics. These drug-resistant bugs are "an even greater threat to mankind than cancer," said Osborne, who was in the District of Columbia late last week during a meeting of the International Monetary Fund, The Guardian reported...

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