Sustaining success: aligning the public health workforce in South-Eastern Europe with strategic public health priorities.

Objectives: To map out the Public Health Workforce (PHW) involved in successful public health interventions.

Methods: We did a pilot assessment of human resources involved in successful interventions addressing public health challenges in the countries of South-Eastern Europe (SEE). High-level representatives of eight countries reported about success stories through the coaching by experts.

Data mashups: potential contribution to decision support on climate change and health.

Linking environmental, socioeconomic and health datasets provides new insights into the potential associations between climate change and human health and wellbeing, and underpins the development of decision support tools that will promote resilience to climate change, and thus enable more effective adaptation. This paper outlines the challenges and opportunities presented by advances in data collection, storage, analysis, and access, particularly focusing on "data mashups". These data mashups are integrations of different types and sources of data, frequently using open application programming interfaces and data sources, to produce enriched results that were not necessarily the original reason for assembling the raw source data.

Neuraminidase inhibitors for influenza: a review and public health perspective in the aftermath of the 2009 pandemic.

Objectives: The objectives of this study were to: (1) reflect on key stages in the discovery, development and pre-pandemic use of neuraminidase inhibitors (NAIs), (2) summarise the evidence of NAI effectiveness for treatment and prophylaxis of seasonal influenza prior to the 2009 pandemic, and (3) summarise the evidence base generated during the 2009 pandemic period.

Design: A rapid systematic review of evidence published to June 2010 was conducted where existing high-quality systematic reviews formed a baseline and were supplemented with data from other reviews, randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and observational studies.

Main Outcome Measures: Severity and duration of symptoms; rates of severe illness, complications and death following treatment for influenza or influenza-like illness; rates of influenza and influenza-like illness following long-term prophylaxis or post-exposure prophylaxis of household contacts.