Audit of the Sydney Local Health District Public Health Unit notification and contact tracing system during the first wave of COVID-19.

Objective: To conduct a real-time audit to assess a Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) activity to improve the quality of public health data in the Sydney Local Health District (SLHD) Public Health Unit during the first wave of COVID-19.

Methods: A real-time audit of the Notifiable Conditions Information Management System was conducted for positive cases of COVID-19 and their close contacts from SLHD. After recording missing and inaccurate data, the audit team then corrected the data.

Consumer directed care aged care reforms in Australia since 2009: A retrospective policy analysis.

In 2009, the Australian federal government used the projected rise in aged care expenditure and changing societal attitudes to justify the decision to overhaul the funding for aged healthcare services. A major feature of the reforms was the introduction of a consumer directed care (CDC) model. This followed the UK, Sweden, Canada and the USA who had already implemented CDC to some degree.

Ebola, quarantine, and the need for a new ethical framework.

Quarantine is a broad public health strategy used to control infectious diseases outbreaks. An arguably most aggressive public health intervention, quarantine limits the asymptomatic individuals' liberty and can result in significant harm. Quarantine was used in an attempt to control several Ebola outbreaks during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014.

Interactive selective pressures of HLA-restricted immune responses and antiretroviral drugs on HIV-1.

HIV-specific cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) responses mediated by human leukocyte antigen (HLA) recognition and antiretroviral drugs exert selection pressure on HIV-1 in vivo. The selection of CTL escape mutations strongly underpins the failure of CTL control in most untreated infections whilst drug-resistance mutations predict failure of drug control. These two evolutionary forces share common target residues in HIV-1 at which their selection effects could be synergistic or antagonistic, such that the propensity to develop drug resistance and virological treatment failure may be influenced by HLA type.

Randomized, controlled, 48-week study of switching stavudine and/or protease inhibitors to combivir/abacavir to prevent or reverse lipoatrophy in HIV-infected patients.

Objective: HIV-1 protease inhibitors (versus no protease inhibitors) and stavudine (versus zidovudine) are independently associated with a higher risk of lipoatrophy in HIV-infected patients. We sought to determine whether the revision of stavudine and/or protease inhibitor-containing regimens to combivir/abacavir would result in prevention and/or reversibility of lipoatrophy in HIV-1-infected patients.

Design: The investigation was a prospective, randomized, controlled, open-label study.

Evidence of HIV-1 adaptation to HLA-restricted immune responses at a population level.

Antigen-specific T cell immunity is HLA-restricted. Human immunodeficiency virus-type 1 (HIV-1) mutations that allow escape from host immune responses may therefore be HLA allele-specific. We analyzed HIV-1 reverse transcriptase sequences from a large HLA-diverse population of HIV-1-infected individuals.