Determinants of nurses' willingness to receive vaccines: Application of the health belief model.

Aims And Objectives: To assess the willingness of nurses to receive vaccines as recommended by Taiwan's "Immunization Recommendations for Healthcare Personnel" (IRHCP), as well as the factors associated with their willingness.

Background: Immunisation for healthcare personnel (HCP) is a means of reducing pathogen transmission. Also, vaccinating HCP reduces personnel and labour costs during an epidemic.

Evaluation of an adjustable epidemiologic information system.

Background: In order to facilitate public health response and to achieve early control of infectious disease epidemics, an adjustable epidemiologic information system (AEIS) was established in the Taiwan public health network in February 2006.

Methodology/principal Findings: The performance of AEIS for the period 2006 through 2008 was evaluated based on a number of response times (RT) and the public health impact. After implementation of the system, the apparent overall shortened RT was mainly due to the shortening of personnel response time (PRT) and the time needed to draft a new questionnaire that incurred as personnel-system interface (PSI); PRT dropped from a fluctuating range of 9.

Low seroprevalence of parvovirus B19 in Taiwanese children and young adults.

Background: This study aimed to evaluate the prevalence of parvovirus B19 antibodies in children and young adults aged=30 years old in Taiwan.

Methods: Stored serum samples from healthy volunteers aged 1-29 years in Taipei were randomly selected and tested for antiparvovirus B19 immunoglobulin G by enzyme immunoassay.

Results: A total of 277 serum samples were tested.

Establishing a nationwide emergency department-based syndromic surveillance system for better public health responses in Taiwan.

Background: With international concern over emerging infectious diseases (EID) and bioterrorist attacks, public health is being required to have early outbreak detection systems. A disease surveillance team was organized to establish a hospital emergency department-based syndromic surveillance system (ED-SSS) capable of automatically transmitting patient data electronically from the hospitals responsible for emergency care throughout the country to the Centers for Disease Control in Taiwan (Taiwan-CDC) starting March, 2004. This report describes the challenges and steps involved in developing ED-SSS and the timely information it provides to improve in public health decision-making.

Quarantine for SARS, Taiwan.

During the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Taiwan, >150,000 persons were quarantined, 24 of whom were later found to have laboratory-confirmed SARS-coronavirus (SARS-CoV) infection. Since no evidence exists that SARS-CoV is infective before the onset of symptoms and the quarantined persons were exposed but not symptomatic, we thought the quarantine's effectiveness should be investigated. Using the Taiwan quarantine data, we found that the onset-to-diagnosis time of previously quarantined confirmed case-patients was significantly shortened compared to that for those who had not been quarantined.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus on hospital surfaces.

Background: Health care workers continued to contract severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), even after barrier precautions were widely implemented.

Methods: We explored the possible contribution of contaminated hospital surfaces to SARS transmission by swabbing surfaces in 2 hospitals and testing the swab samples by reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and viral culture.

Results: Twenty-six of 94 swab samples tested positive for viral RNA.