Publications by authors named "J Van de Kassteele"
Objectives: SARS-CoV-2 viral load could be an important parameter for transmission potential. Here, we use RT-qPCR cycle threshold (Ct) values as a proxy for viral load. We assess the effect of COVID-19 vaccination and prior infection status on Ct value, while accounting for the virus variant.
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- After COVID-19 restrictions were lifted in 2022, the incidence of invasive group A streptococcal (iGAS) infections increased among children and adults, linked to a rise in other viral infections like influenza and varicella.
- A study in the Netherlands aimed to quantify how much skin and soft tissue infections (SSTI) and pneumonia/sepsis cases in children and adults were connected to these viral infections.
- Findings showed that from 2010-2023, varicella was responsible for a significant portion of GAS SSTI cases, while influenza A was the main viral contributor to pneumonia/sepsis, indicating the need for public health interventions like vaccinations to mitigate iGAS infection rates.
Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands developed a pipeline of scripts to automate and streamline the production of epidemiological situation reports (epi‑sitrep). The pipeline was developed for the Automation of Data Import, Summarization, and Communication (hereafter called the A-DISC pipeline).
Objective: This paper describes the A-DISC pipeline and provides a customizable scripts template that may be useful for other countries wanting to automate their infectious disease surveillance processes.
BackgroundVaccine uptake differs between social groups. Mobile vaccination units (MV-units) were deployed in the Netherlands by municipal health services in neighbourhoods with low uptake of COVID-19 vaccines.AimWe aimed to evaluate the impact of MV-units on vaccine uptake in neighbourhoods with low vaccine uptake.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Although older people in nursing homes have a larger susceptibility to infectious diseases, the extent to which infectious diseases contribute to their mortality is unknown. Therefore, we quantified the associations between seasonal infectious diseases and all-cause mortality in Dutch nursing homes.
Methods: We analyzed time series (January 2009 to December 2021) of the weekly sentinel surveillance of infectious diseases in Dutch nursing homes.