Thinking out of the box: revisiting health surveillance based on medical records.

Despite the considerable advances in the last years, the health information systems for health surveillance still need to overcome some critical issues so that epidemic detection can be performed in real time. For instance, despite the efforts of the Brazilian Ministry of Health (MoH) to make COVID-19 data available during the pandemic, delays due to data entry and data availability posed an additional threat to disease monitoring. Here, we propose a complementary approach by using electronic medical records (EMRs) data collected in real time to generate a system to enable insights from the local health surveillance system personnel.

Impact on mortality of being seropositive for hepatitis C virus antibodies among blood donors in Brazil: A twenty-year study.

Introduction: Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a major health problem associated with considerable risk of mortality in different regions of the world. The purpose of this study was to investigate the contribution of HCV infection on all-cause and liver-related mortality, in a large cohort of blood donors in Brazil.

Methods: This is a retrospective cohort study of blood donors from 1994 to 2013, at Fundação Pró-Sangue-Hemocentro de São Paulo (FPS).

A nosocomial cluster of Candida inconspicua infections in patients with hematological malignancies.

Candida inconspicua was recovered from three patients with hematological malignancies. Two patients had intravenous-catheter-associated fungemia, whereas the third had fungal hepatitis. The three cases of infection occurred over a period of 1 month in patients staying in adjacent single rooms.

Impaired glucose tolerance and its co-variates among 2079 non-diabetic elderly subjects. Ten-year mortality and morbidity in the CASTEL study. CArdiovascular STudy in the ELderly.

This study evaluated the role of impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) as a risk factor in a general population of 2079 non-diabetic elderly subjects. The 10-year cardiovascular morbidity was similar in normal and IGT subjects. Mortality was greater in IGT, but the Cox equations of the hazard rate were different in younger and older subjects: age, sex, lung function (forced expiratory volume in 1 s, FEV1), serum uric acid, IGT and proteinuria were predictors of overall mortality in the age class 65-79 years, while only the first 4 were associated with cardiovascular mortality.

Lower blood pressure values in blood donors?

594 blood donors were studied to define the influence of regular blood donation on blood pressure. Blood pressures were compared at the first phlebotomy performed at the Padova Blood Unit, the 13-year phlebotomy, and the median between the two. As a control population, a cohort of 594 non-donors from the same general population similar to the blood donors was studied twice at a 15-year interval.