Estimating the Exposure-Response Relationship between Fine Mineral Dust Concentration and Coccidioidomycosis Incidence Using Speciated Particulate Matter Data: A Longitudinal Surveillance Study.

Background: Coccidioidomycosis, caused by inhalation of spp. spores, is an emerging infectious disease that is increasing in incidence throughout the southwestern US. The pathogen is soil-dwelling, and spore dispersal and human exposure are thought to co-occur with airborne mineral dust exposures, yet fundamental exposure-response relationships have not been conclusively estimated.

Prolonged dry seasons lengthen coccidioidomycosis transmission seasons: implications for a changing California.

Coccidioidomycosis, a fungal disease caused by soil-borne spp., exhibits pronounced seasonal transmission, with incidence in California typically peaking in the fall. However, the influence of climate on the timing and duration of transmission seasons remains poorly understood.

Scientists' call to action: Microbes, planetary health, and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Microorganisms, including bacteria, archaea, viruses, fungi, and protists, are essential to life on Earth and the functioning of the biosphere. Here, we discuss the key roles of microorganisms in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), highlighting recent and emerging advances in microbial research and technology that can facilitate our transition toward a sustainable future. Given the central role of microorganisms in the biochemical processing of elements, synthesizing new materials, supporting human health, and facilitating life in managed and natural landscapes, microbial research and technologies are directly or indirectly relevant for achieving each of the SDGs.

Coccidioidomycosis seasonality in California: a longitudinal surveillance study of the climate determinants and spatiotemporal variability of seasonal dynamics, 2000-2021.

Background: Coccidioidomycosis, an emerging fungal disease in the western USA, exhibits seasonal patterns that are poorly understood, including periods of strong cyclicity, aseasonal intervals, and variation in seasonal timing that have been minimally characterized, and unexplained as to their causal factors. Coccidioidomycosis incidence has increased markedly in recent years, and our limited understanding of intra- and inter-annual seasonality has hindered the identification of important drivers of disease transmission, including climate conditions. In this study, we aim to characterize coccidioidomycosis seasonality in endemic regions of California and to estimate the relationship between drought conditions and coccidioidomycosis seasonal periodicity and timing.

COVID-19 Vaccination and Incidence of Pediatric SARS-CoV-2 Infection and Hospitalization.

Importance: A SARS-CoV-2 vaccine was approved for adolescents aged 12 to 15 years on May 10, 2021, with approval for younger age groups following thereafter. The population level impact of the pediatric COVID-19 vaccination program has not yet been established.

Objective: To identify whether California's pediatric COVID-19 immunization program was associated with changes in pediatric COVID-19 incidence and hospitalizations.

Association between wildfires and coccidioidomycosis incidence in California, 2000-2018: a synthetic control analysis.

Unlabelled: The frequency and severity of wildfires in the Western United States have increased over recent decades, motivating hypotheses that wildfires contribute to the incidence of coccidioidomycosis, an emerging fungal disease in the Western United States with sharp increases in incidence observed since 2000. While coccidioidomycosis outbreaks have occurred among wildland firefighters clearing brush, it remains unknown whether fires are associated with an increased incidence among the general population.

Methods: We identified 19 wildfires occurring within California's highly endemic San Joaquin Valley between 2003 and 2015.

Coccidioides undetected in soils from agricultural land and uncorrelated with time or the greater soil fungal community on undeveloped land.

Coccidioidomycosis is a typically respiratory fungal disease that, in the United States, occurs primarily in Arizona and California. In California, most coccidioidomycosis cases occur in the San Joaquin Valley, a primarily agricultural region where the disease poses a risk for outdoor workers. We collected 710 soil samples and 265 settled dust samples from nine sites in the San Joaquin Valley and examined how Coccidioides detection varied by month, site, and the presence and abundance of other fungal species.

Reframing Optimal Control Problems for Infectious Disease Management in Low-Income Countries.

Optimal control theory can be a useful tool to identify the best strategies for the management of infectious diseases. In most of the applications to disease control with ordinary differential equations, the objective functional to be optimized is formulated in monetary terms as the sum of intervention costs and the cost associated with the burden of disease. We present alternate formulations that express epidemiological outcomes via health metrics and reframe the problem to include features such as budget constraints and epidemiological targets.

Pyrethroid insecticides pose greater risk than organophosphate insecticides to biocontrol agents for human schistosomiasis.

Use of agrochemicals, including insecticides, is vital to food production and predicted to increase 2-5 fold by 2050. Previous studies have shown a positive association between agriculture and the human infectious disease schistosomiasis, which is problematic as this parasitic disease infects approximately 250 million people worldwide. Certain insecticides might runoff fields and be highly toxic to invertebrates, such as prawns in the genus Macrobrachium, that are biocontrol agents for snails that transmit the parasites causing schistosomiasis.

Effects of precipitation, heat, and drought on incidence and expansion of coccidioidomycosis in western USA: a longitudinal surveillance study.

Background: Drought is an understudied driver of infectious disease dynamics. Amidst the ongoing southwestern North American megadrought, California (USA) is having the driest multi-decadal period since 800 CE, exacerbated by anthropogenic warming. In this study, we aimed to examine the influence of drought on coccidioidomycosis, an emerging infectious disease in southwestern USA.

Optimizing laboratory-based surveillance networks for monitoring multi-genotype or multi-serotype infections.

With the aid of laboratory typing techniques, infectious disease surveillance networks have the opportunity to obtain powerful information on the emergence, circulation, and evolution of multiple genotypes, serotypes or other subtypes of pathogens, informing understanding of transmission dynamics and strategies for prevention and control. The volume of typing performed on clinical isolates is typically limited by its ability to inform clinical care, cost and logistical constraints, especially in comparison with the capacity to monitor clinical reports of disease occurrence, which remains the most widespread form of public health surveillance. Viewing clinical disease reports as arising from a latent mixture of pathogen subtypes, laboratory typing of a subset of clinical cases can provide inference on the proportion of clinical cases attributable to each subtype (i.

The air mycobiome is decoupled from the soil mycobiome in the California San Joaquin Valley.

Dispersal is a key force in the assembly of fungal communities and the air is the dominant route of dispersal for most fungi. Understanding the dynamics of airborne fungi is important for determining their source and for helping to prevent fungal disease. This understanding is important in the San Joaquin Valley of California, which is home to 4.

Diagnosis of Schistosoma infection in non-human animal hosts: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background: Reliable and field-applicable diagnosis of schistosome infections in non-human animals is important for surveillance, control, and verification of interruption of human schistosomiasis transmission. This study aimed to summarize uses of available diagnostic techniques through a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Methodology And Principal Findings: We systematically searched the literature and reports comparing two or more diagnostic tests in non-human animals for schistosome infection.

Longitudinal social contacts among school-aged children during the COVID-19 pandemic: the Bay Area Contacts among Kids (BACK) study.

Background: The San Francisco Bay Area was the first region in the United States to enact school closures to mitigate SARS-CoV-2 transmission. The effects of closures on contact patterns for schoolchildren and their household members remain poorly understood.

Methods: We conducted serial cross-sectional surveys (May 2020, September 2020, February 2021) of Bay Area households with children to estimate age-structured daily contact rates for children and their adult household members.

A hierarchical model for analyzing multisite individual-level disease surveillance data from multiple systems.

Passive surveillance systems are widely used to monitor diseases occurrence over wide spatial areas due to their cost-effectiveness and integration into broadly distributed healthcare systems. However, such systems are generally associated with imperfect ascertainment of disease cases and with heterogeneous capture probabilities arising from factors such as differential access to care. Augmenting passive surveillance systems with other surveillance efforts provides a way to estimate the true number of incident cases.

Environmental Factors Influencing COVID-19 Incidence and Severity.

Emerging evidence supports a link between environmental factors-including air pollution and chemical exposures, climate, and the built environment-and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) susceptibility and severity. Climate, air pollution, and the built environment have long been recognized to influence viral respiratory infections, and studies have established similar associations with COVID-19 outcomes. More limited evidence links chemical exposures to COVID-19.