A Retrospective Analysis of Jordan's National COVID-19 Call Center: Operations, Effectiveness, and Lessons Learned.

Introduction: Contact tracing has been a cornerstone of non-pharmaceutical interventions to control the COVID-19 epidemic, with highly mixed effectiveness internationally. In Jordan, the Ministry of Health (MOH) collaborated with the Jordan Nurses and Midwives Council and the USAID Local Health System Sustainability Project to set up a call center for contact tracing of COVID-19.

Objective: This study described the operation and assessed the effectiveness of Jordan's COVID-19 call center activities in reaching COVID-19 cases and their contacts.

Respiratory Disease Surveillance in the Middle East and Latin America during the COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020-2022.

Characterizing the epidemiology of circulating respiratory pathogens during the COVID-19 pandemic could clarify the burden of acute respiratory infections and monitor outbreaks of public health and military relevance. The US Department of Defense supported 2 regions for influenza-like illness and severe acute respiratory infections surveillance, one in the Middle East through US Naval Medical Research Unit EURAFCENT, and another in Latin America through US Naval Medical Research Unit SOUTH. During 2020‒2022, coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic, we collected a total of 16,146 nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal swab samples from sentinel sites in Jordan (n = 11,305) and Latin America (n = 4,841).

Clinical, molecular, and drug resistance epidemiology of HIV in Jordan, 2019-2021: A national study.

Background: Limited epidemiologic studies have been conducted in Jordan describing the HIV epidemic. This study aimed to address this gap to inform HIV prevention and control.

Methods: A nationally-representative cross-sectional study was conducted among adults living with HIV in Jordan.

Risk as catalyst for positive change: lessons learnt from public health readiness for cholera in Jordan.

This case study highlights how a looming health crisis was leveraged as drivers for positive change for the health sector, in line with the health security agenda. In Jordan, several authorities are mandated by law to manage health emergencies. Following the declaration of outbreaks of cholera in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, health authorities in Jordan called for a series of emergency meetings during September 2022 to discuss implications around travel and trade as well as shared waters.

Implementation of one health approach in Jordan: Joint risk assessment of rabies and avian influenza utilizing the tripartite operational tool.

Background Health challenges at the human-animal-environment interface vary and include zoonotic and food-borne diseases as well as antimicrobial resistance. These are serious threats to animal and public health, and account for the majority of emerging and re-emerging conditions or infectious diseases. Reducing zoonotic disease threats requires an understanding of where and why risks exist.

Effect of stemming on text similarity for Arabic language at sentence level.

Semantic Text Similarity (STS) has several and important applications in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). The Aim of this study is to investigate the effect of stemming on text similarity for Arabic language at sentence level. Several Arabic light and heavy stemmers as well as lemmatization algorithms are used in this study, with a total of 10 algorithms.

Trend of Cutaneous Leishmaniasis in Jordan From 2010 to 2016: Retrospective Study.

Background: Cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) is endemic in the Middle East, with countries such as Syria reporting high incidence rates.

Objective: This study aimed to assess the trends in the incidence of cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) in Jordan from 2010 to 2016.

Methods: This retrospective study included all cases of CL that had been reported to the Leishmaniasis Surveillance System in the Department of Communicable Diseases at the Jordan Ministry of Health during the period from 2010 to 2016.