In the Digital Era, Is Community Outrage a Feasible Proxy Indicator of Emotional Epidemiology? The Case of Meningococcal Disease in Sardinia, Italy.

The aims of this study were (i) to evaluate the relationship between official data on invasive meningococcal disease cases in Sardinia and the reporting of the cases by a regional online newspaper and (ii) to identify indicators useful for understanding the community outrage related to health events. Cases of meningococcal disease, selected from articles published between 1999 and 2016 on a regional newspaper database, were compared to those reported to the Infectious Disease Information Service. In order to evaluate the equality of the two distribution records, the Kolgomorov Smirnov test for two samples was applied.

Do I need training in public health ethics? A survey on Italian residents' beliefs, knowledge and curricula.

Introduction: Ethics is needed to support the decision-making process in public health and to face moral issues during practice. However, professionals are often not adequately trained.

Objectives: In 2015, the National Conference of Public Health Medical Residents of the Italian Society of Public Health started the "Public Health Ethics" workgroup to evaluate how the Italian Schools of Public Health train their residents in ethics, and which are residents' beliefs, knowledge and attitudes about public health ethics.

[Microbial contamination of surfaces in the departments of Medicine and Surgery: single center prevalence study in Sassari (Italy)].

Introduction: Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) represent a clinical and public health problem worldwide. Microbial transmission can frequently occurs between patients or between patients and health-care workers; however, several devices and surfaces could act as reservoir and source of microorganisms. Aim of this cross-sectional study was to show the microbial contamination of devices or surfaces located in the departments of Medicine and Surgery of an Italian University Hospital.