Emerging infectious diseases: prediction and detection

Abstract

Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs), including West Nile virus, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Lyme disease, have had a direct effect within Canada, while many more EIDs such as Zika, chikungunya and Ebola are a threat to Canadians while travelling. Over 75% of EIDs affecting humans are, or were originally, zoonoses (infectious diseases transmitted from animals to humans). There are two main ways by which infectious diseases can emerge: by changes in their geographical ranges and by adaptive emergence, a genetic change in a microorganism that results in it becoming capable of invading a new niche, often by jumping to a new host species such as humans. Diseases can appear to emerge simply because we become capable of detecting and diagnosing them. Management of EID events is a key role of public health globally and a considerable challenge for clinical care. Increasingly, emphasis is being placed on predicting EID occurrence to "get ahead of the curve" -that is, allowing health systems to be poised to respond to them, and public health to be ready to prevent them. Predictive models estimate where and when EIDs may occur and the levels of risk they pose. Evaluation of the internal and external drivers that trigger emergence events is increasingly considered in predicting EID events. Currently, global changes are driving increasing occurrence of EIDs, but our capacity to prevent and deal with them is also increasing. Web-based scanning and analysis methods are increasingly allowing us to detect EID outbreaks, modern genomics and bioinformatics are increasing our ability to identify their genetic and geographical origins, while developments in geomatics and earth observation will enable more real-time tracking of outbreaks. EIDs will, however, remain a key, global public health challenge in a globalized world where demographic, climatic, and other environmental changes are altering the interactions between hosts and pathogen in ways that increase spillover from animals to humans and global spread.Affiliations

Pathogenic viruses: Molecular detection and characterization

“…Emerging and re-emerging viral diseases have recently attracted worldwide attention. Ebola, zika, H5N1 avian influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and many other emerging viral diseases have proved fatal and caused worldwide concern (World Health Organization (WHO), 2018; Bloom et al, 2017;Ogden et al, 2017). One of the critical events linked to the emergence of new viral diseases is viral genetic change that allows viruses to become established in a new host species, able to infect humans and cause a local, regional or worldwide health threat (Pekosz and Glass, 2008).…”

A Distributed Architecture for DDoS Prediction and Bot Detection

“…The same takes place on cardiovascular diseases where diabetes mellitus is associated with a significant increase in risk for cardiovascular disease, but this risk is not uniform [19]. Even on infectious diseases, evaluation of internal and external drivers, that trigger emergence events, is increasingly helpful for predicting these events [20].…”

Qu’apprend-t-on de nouveau des épidémies émergentes ?

“…La figure 1 montre le niveau capacitaire de la Guinée en 2017, qui s'est sans doute amélioré après la fin de l'épidémie de MVE en avril 2016, même si aucune information n'est disponible pour l'année 2013 [15,23]. La mise en place dans les pays à ressources limitées d'un système de veille sanitaire capable de détecter rapidement, voire de prédire des MIE, proche du modèle des pays développés (figure 2), peut désormais être envisagée grâce notamment aux technologies d'information et de communication [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38]. La solidarité internationale, dont bénéficient ces pays pour la restauration de leurs systèmes de santé, doit aider à la mise en place ou le renforcement d'une veille de qualité et adaptée afin de préserver leur propre sécurité sanitaire et celle du reste du monde [39].…”

“…Schéma global de veille sanitaire pour l'alerte précoce et la réponse rapide (APR) [28][29][30][31][32] de l'expression clinique de la phase aiguë y compris chez le patient ayant un profil de survivant. Il en est moins la règle dans le cas de l'infection par le virus Zika, à cause du caractère paradoxalement insidieux de l'expression paucisymptomique ou même infraclinique de l'infection aiguë, souvent réduite à un exanthème non fébrile fugace, et donc propice au risque de transmission sexuelle au cours d'une maladie virale aiguë non repérée [53].…”