Articles: pandemics.
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Historical Article
What Recent History Has Taught Us About Responding to Emerging Infectious Disease Threats.
Presidential administrations face any number of unexpected crises during their tenure, and global pandemics are among the most challenging. As of January 2017, one of the authors had served under 5 presidents as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. ⋯ These experiences underscored the need to optimize preparation for and response to these threats whenever and wherever they emerge. This article recounts selected outbreaks occurring during this period and highlights lessons that were learned that can be applied to the infectious disease threats that will inevitably be faced in the current presidential administration and beyond.
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Global health advocates often turn to medicine and science for solutions to enduring health risks, but law is also a powerful tool. No state acting alone can ward off health threats that span borders, requiring international solutions. ⋯ Moreover, major health concerns remain largely unregulated at the international level, such as non-communicable diseases, mental health, and injuries. Here, we offer reforms for this global health law trilogy.
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Real-time modelling is an essential component of the public health response to an outbreak of pandemic influenza in the UK. A model for epidemic reconstruction based on realistic epidemic surveillance data has been developed, but this model needs enhancing to provide spatially disaggregated epidemic estimates while ensuring that real-time implementation is feasible. ⋯ Modelling studies investigating the impact of pandemic interventions (e.g. vaccination and school closure); the utility of alternative data sources (e.g. internet searches) to augment traditional surveillance; and the correct handling of test sensitivity and specificity in serological data, propagating this uncertainty into the real-time modelling.