Understanding the opioid syndemic in North Carolina: A novel approach to modeling and identifying factors.

The opioid epidemic is a significant public health challenge in North Carolina, but limited data restrict our understanding of its complexity. Examining trends and relationships among different outcomes believed to reflect opioid misuse provides an alternative perspective to understand the opioid epidemic. We use a Bayesian dynamic spatial factor model to capture the interrelated dynamics within six different county-level outcomes, such as illicit opioid overdose deaths, emergency department visits related to drug overdose, treatment counts for opioid use disorder, patients receiving prescriptions for buprenorphine, and newly diagnosed cases of acute and chronic hepatitis C virus and human immunodeficiency virus.

Advancing Ethical Considerations for Data Science in Injury and Violence Prevention.

Data science is an emerging field that provides new analytical methods. It incorporates novel data sources (eg, internet data) and methods (eg, machine learning) that offer valuable and timely insights into public health issues, including injury and violence prevention. The objective of this research was to describe ethical considerations for public health data scientists conducting injury and violence prevention-related data science projects to prevent unintended ethical, legal, and social consequences, such as loss of privacy or loss of public trust.

Optimizing Exposure Measures in Large-Scale Household Air Pollution Studies: Results from the Multicountry HAPIN Trial.

Repeated measurements of household air pollution may provide better estimates of average exposure but can add to costs and participant burden. In a randomized trial of gas versus biomass cookstoves in four countries, we took supplemental personal 24-h measurements on a 10% subsample for mothers and infants, interspersed between protocol samples. Mothers had up to five postrandomization protocol measurements over 16 months, while infants had three measurements over one year.

Exposure Contrasts of Women Aged 40-79 Years during the Household Air Pollution Intervention Network Randomized Controlled Trial.

Exposure to household air pollution has been linked to adverse health outcomes among women aged 40-79. Little is known about how shifting from biomass cooking to a cleaner fuel like liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) could impact exposures for this population. We report 24-h exposures to particulate matter (PM), black carbon (BC), and carbon monoxide (CO) among women aged 40 to <80 years participating in the Household Air Pollution Intervention Network trial.

Accounting for local incidence when estimating rotavirus vaccine efficacy among countries: a pooled analysis of monovalent rotavirus vaccine trials.

Rotavirus vaccine appears to perform sub-optimally in countries with higher rotavirus burden. We hypothesized that differences in the magnitude of rotavirus exposures may bias vaccine efficacy (VE) estimates, so true differences in country-specific rotavirus VE would be exaggerated without accommodating differences in exposure. We estimated VE against any-severity and severe rotavirus gastroenteritis (RVGE) using Poisson regression models fit to pooled individual-level data from Phase II and III monovalent rotavirus vaccine trials conducted between 2000 and 2012.