Antibody responses against influenza A decline with successive years of annual influenza vaccination.

Influenza vaccine effectiveness and immunogenicity can be compromised with repeated vaccination. We assessed immunological markers in a cohort of healthcare workers (HCW) from six public hospitals around Australia during 2020-2021. Sera were collected pre-vaccination and ~14 and ~180 days post-vaccination and assessed in haemagglutination inhibition assay against egg-grown vaccine and equivalent cell-grown viruses.

Seroepidemiology of human leptospirosis in the Dominican Republic: A multistage cluster survey, 2021.

Little is known about the epidemiology of leptospirosis in the Dominican Republic, the second most populous country in the Caribbean. We report on findings from a multi-stage household survey across two regions in the country that reveals a previously under-estimated burden of human Leptospira infection. Our findings, based on the reference-standard microscopic agglutination test, indicate a complex picture of serogroup diversity, spatial heterogeneity in infection and risk, and a marked discrepancy between reported cases and serologically estimated infections.

From the 100 Day Mission to 100 lines of software development: how to improve early outbreak analytics.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, considerable advances have been made to improve epidemic preparedness by accelerating diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccine development. However, we argue that it is crucial to make equivalent efforts in the field of outbreak analytics to help ensure reliable, evidence-based decision making. To explore the challenges and key priorities in the field of outbreak analytics, the Epiverse-TRACE initiative brought together a multidisciplinary group of experts, including field epidemiologists, data scientists, academics, and software engineers from public health institutions across multiple countries.

Temporal contact patterns and the implications for predicting superspreaders and planning of targeted outbreak control.

Directly transmitted infectious diseases spread through social contacts that change over time, but outbreak models typically make simplifying assumptions about network structure and dynamics. To assess how common assumptions relate to real-world interactions, we analysed 11 networks from five settings and developed metrics, capturing crucial epidemiological features of these networks. We developed a novel metric, the 'retention index', to characterize the distribution of retained contacts over consecutive time steps relative to fully static and dynamic networks.