Upcoming Webinar on "Disaster Surveillance: Lessons Learned from the Field"

On Monday, June 28th, the Public Health Practice Committee is hosting a webinar on "Disaster Surveillance: Lessons Learned from the Field," from 12:30 - 1:30 pm EST. There will be a 45 minute presentation followed by a 15 minute Q&A session.

Speakers and Topics:

Aaron Kite-Powell, Florida Department of Public Health: Overview of disaster surveillance experiences in Florida - hurricanes, fires, and evacuees

Amy Roach, South Carolina Department of Public Health: Airport surveillance - "on the ground" during the airport screen for evacuees from Haiti

Dan Drociuk, South Carolina Department of Public Health: Communication and information sharing - State to State interactions "pre-event"

Register here.

2010 Call for Abstracts

Ninth Annual Conference of the International Society for Disease Surveillance
Enhancing the synergy between research, informatics, and practice in public health

December 1-2, 2010
The Canyons Resort, Park City, Utah

Submissions of original work are now being accepted for presentation at the 9th annual International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) conference to be held in Park City, Utah, December 1-2, 2010. This year’s conference will focus on enhancing the synergy between research, informatics, and practice in public health. Topics that address the conference theme and/or international surveillance and collaboration are especially encouraged.

The ISDS Conference is the premier annual scientific gathering for researchers and practitioners in public health, epidemiology, health policy, biostatistics and mathematical modeling, informatics, computer science, and related fields focused on biosurveillance and emerging challenges to public health practice. The conference will feature internationally renowned speakers from health departments, leading universities, government agencies, and top industrial organizations.

The four themes for abstract submissions are:
•Public health surveillance
•Analytics/research methodologies
•Informatics (applications/practice and architecture/integration/interoperability)
•Applications of methodologies to new domains

Submit your abstract online

Questions regarding the call for abstracts may be sent to the Scientific Program Chair, Atar Baer.

We look forward to receiving your submissions and to seeing you in Park City in December at the annual conference.

Best regards,

The International Society for Disease Surveillance

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Important Dates:
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Web site open for submissions: June 21, 2010
Submission deadline: September 3, 2010 (midnight Eastern U.S.)
Authors notified of acceptance: October 15th, 2010
Pre-conference workshop: November 30, 2010
Conference: December 1-2, 2010

Upcoming Webinar: Rates of Hospital-Acquired Respiratory Illness in Bangladeshi Tertiary Care Hospitals

The ISDS Global Outreach and Research Committees are pleased to welcome Emily Gurley as the guest speaker for their next joint webinar. She will present on her recently published work entitled, "Rates of Hospital-Acquired Respiratory Illness in Bangladeshi Tertiary Care Hospitals: Results from a Low-Cost Pilot Surveillance Strategy":

Respiratory infections can spread quickly in crowded hospitals with limited infection control infrastructure, and these facilities typically also lack surveillance systems to detect hospital acquired disease. We piloted a simple, syndromic surveillance strategy for hospital acquired respiratory infections in 3 tertiary care hospitals in Bangladesh and found that clusters of disease were frequent and that approximately 6 such infection occurred per 1000 patient days at risk. This low-tech surveillance strategy could be used in resource-poor hospital settings to better define burden of disease and evaluate the impact of infection control interventions.

The webinar will take place on Tuesday, July 6th from 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm EST.

Register here.

ISDS/Distribute Presentations at CSTE Annual Conference

At the 2010 CSTE Annual Conference, running from June 6th to June 10th in Portland, Oregon, there will be two presentations by ISDS members on the Distribute Project:

Monday, June 7th, 2010 at 4:30 pm PST:
ISDS President David Buckeridge will be giving an oral presentation entitled, "Innovations in public health surveillance: Lessons learned from the rapid expansion of the Distribute project to support H1N1 surveillance." This presentation is a part of the Surveillance/Informatics I session on Innovations & Progress in Data Integration and Sharing.

Tuesday, June 8th, 10:00 am PST:
ISDS Board members Bill Lober and John Brownstein, along with Taha Kass-Hout, Acting Deputy Director at CDC, will be hosting a poster session entitled, "An innovative, distributed surveillance informatics infrastructure for H1N1 and beyond." This poster (Board #701) is a part of the Surveillance/Informatics session in Exhibit Hall A.

Full agenda available here.