Privacy guarantees for personal mobility data in humanitarian response.

Personal mobility data from mobile phones and other sensors are increasingly used to inform policymaking during pandemics, natural disasters, and other humanitarian crises. However, even aggregated mobility traces can reveal private information about individual movements to potentially malicious actors. This paper develops and tests an approach for releasing private mobility data, which provides formal guarantees over the privacy of the underlying subjects.

Leveraging real-world Data from administrative claims and medical records to inform safety and effectiveness of piperacillin-tazobactam in the Management of Pediatric Hospital Acquired Pneumonia.

Pediatric-specific safety data are required during development of pharmaceutical agents. Retrospective studies can leverage real-world data to assess safety and effectiveness in children where prospective, controlled studies are not feasible. A retrospective cohort study combined data from Pediatric Health Information Systems (PHIS) and medical records to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of piperacillin/tazobactam (P/T) in pediatric patients with hospital-acquired pneumonia (HAP).

Approach for defining human adenovirus infection and disease for central review adjudication in clinical studies.

Background: Pediatric allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplant (allo-HCT) recipients are at risk for morbidity and mortality from human adenovirus (HAdV). HAdV can be detected in an asymptomatic state, referred to as infection or with signs or symptoms of illness, referred to as disease. Standardized case definitions are needed to distinguish infection from disease and allow for consistent reporting in both observational cohort studies and therapeutic clinical trials.

Disparities in Cytomegalovirus Infection Rates by Race and Ethnicity among Pediatric Allogeneic Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation Recipients at a Single Center.

Previous literature has reported cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection rate disparities among racial/ethnic groups of hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) recipients. Because race and ethnicity categorizations are social constructs unlikely to affect biological systems, it is likely there are covariates on the pathway to CMV detection, known as mediators, that can explain the observed disparity. Recent developments in mediation analysis methods enable the analysis of time-to-event outcomes, allowing an investigation of these disparities to also consider the timing of CMV infection detection relative to HCT.

Geographic microtargeting of social assistance with high-resolution poverty maps.

Hundreds of millions of poor families receive some form of targeted social assistance. Many of these antipoverty programs involve some degree of geographic targeting, where aid is prioritized to the poorest regions of the country. However, policy makers in many low-resource settings lack the disaggregated poverty data required to make effective geographic targeting decisions.

Mobile phone data reveal the effects of violence on internal displacement in Afghanistan.

Nearly 50 million people globally have been internally displaced due to conflict, persecution and human rights violations. However, the study of internally displaced persons-and the design of policies to assist them-is complicated by the fact that these people are often underrepresented in surveys and official statistics. We develop an approach to measure the impact of violence on internal displacement using anonymized high-frequency mobile phone data.

Machine learning and phone data can improve targeting of humanitarian aid.

The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated many low- and middle-income countries, causing widespread food insecurity and a sharp decline in living standards. In response to this crisis, governments and humanitarian organizations worldwide have distributed social assistance to more than 1.5 billion people.

COVID-19 Case Investigation and Contact Tracing Programs and Practice: Snapshots From the Field.

Between Fall 2020 and Spring 2021, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials conducted 2 rapid queries to collect information from the field regarding the status of COVID-19 case investigation and contact tracing (CI/CT) programs and practice. These short surveys were distributed to senior deputies in state and territorial health agencies, yielding a response rate of 45.8% (November 2020) and 40.

Microestimates of wealth for all low- and middle-income countries.

Many critical policy decisions, from strategic investments to the allocation of humanitarian aid, rely on data about the geographic distribution of wealth and poverty. Yet many poverty maps are out of date or exist only at very coarse levels of granularity. Here we develop microestimates of the relative wealth and poverty of the populated surface of all 135 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) at 2.

Evolution of severe acute respiratory coronavirus virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) seroprevalence among employees of a US academic children's hospital during coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

Objective: To describe the cumulative seroprevalence of severe acute respiratory coronavirus virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) antibodies during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic among employees of a large pediatric healthcare system.

Design, Setting, And Participants: Prospective observational cohort study open to adult employees at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, conducted April 20-December 17, 2020.

Methods: Employees were recruited starting with high-risk exposure groups, utilizing e-mails, flyers, and announcements at virtual town hall meetings.

Early stool microbiome and metabolome signatures in pediatric patients undergoing allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation.

Background: The contribution of the gastrointestinal tract microbiome to outcomes after allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) is increasingly recognized. Investigations of larger pediatric cohorts aimed at defining the microbiome state and associated metabolic patterns pretransplant are needed.

Methods: We sought to describe the pretransplant stool microbiome in pediatric allogenic HCT patients at four centers.

Public mobility data enables COVID-19 forecasting and management at local and global scales.

Policymakers everywhere are working to determine the set of restrictions that will effectively contain the spread of COVID-19 without excessively stifling economic activity. We show that publicly available data on human mobility-collected by Google, Facebook, and other providers-can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and forecast the spread of COVID-19. This approach uses simple and transparent statistical models to estimate the effect of NPIs on mobility, and basic machine learning methods to generate 10-day forecasts of COVID-19 cases.

COVID-19 Case Investigation and Contact Tracing: Early Lessons Learned and Future Opportunities.

Context: Case investigation and contact tracing are fundamental public health strategies for controlling and preventing the spread of infectious diseases. Although the principles behind these strategies are not new, the capacity and operational requirements needed to support disease investigation during the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic are unprecedented. This article analyzes the implementation of case investigation and contact tracing in controlling COVID-19 transmission during the early stages of the US pandemic response (January 20 through August 31, 2020).

A general approach to detecting migration events in digital trace data.

Empirical research on migration has historically been fraught with measurement challenges. Recently, the increasing ubiquity of digital trace data-from mobile phones, social media, and related sources of 'big data'-has created new opportunities for the quantitative analysis of migration. However, most existing work relies on relatively ad hoc methods for inferring migration.

Prevalence and Severity of Food Allergies Among US Adults.

Importance: Food allergy is a costly, potentially life-threatening condition. Although studies have examined the prevalence of childhood food allergy, little is known about prevalence, severity, or health care utilization related to food allergies among US adults.

Objective: To provide nationally representative estimates of the distribution, severity, and factors associated with adult food allergies.

The strength of long-range ties in population-scale social networks.

Long-range connections that span large social networks are widely assumed to be weak, composed of sporadic and emotionally distant relationships. However, researchers historically have lacked the population-scale network data needed to verify the predicted weakness. Using data from 11 culturally diverse population-scale networks on four continents-encompassing 56 million Twitter users and 58 million mobile phone subscribers-we find that long-range ties are nearly as strong as social ties embedded within a small circle of friends.

The Public Health Impact of Parent-Reported Childhood Food Allergies in the United States.

Unlabelled: : media-1vid110.1542/5840360268001PEDS-VA_2018-1235 BACKGROUND: Childhood food allergy (FA) is a life-threatening chronic condition that substantially impairs quality of life. This large, population-based survey estimates childhood FA prevalence and severity of all major allergenic foods.

Mapping poverty using mobile phone and satellite data.

Poverty is one of the most important determinants of adverse health outcomes globally, a major cause of societal instability and one of the largest causes of lost human potential. Traditional approaches to measuring and targeting poverty rely heavily on census data, which in most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are unavailable or out-of-date. Alternate measures are needed to complement and update estimates between censuses.