: Brentuximab Vedotin (BV) has revolutionized the treatment landscape for Hodgkin's lymphoma, yet its effects on pre-existing autoimmune disorders remain elusive. : Here, we present four cases of patients with concurrent autoimmune conditions-Crohn's disease, vitiligo, type I diabetes, and minimal change disease-undergoing BV therapy for Hodgkin's lymphoma. The patients were treated with A-AVD instead of ABVD due to advanced-stage disease with high IPI scores.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn July 2023, the Center of Excellence in Respiratory Pathogens organized a two-day workshop on infectious diseases modelling and the lessons learnt from the Covid-19 pandemic. This report summarizes the rich discussions that occurred during the workshop. The workshop participants discussed multisource data integration and highlighted the benefits of combining traditional surveillance with more novel data sources like mobility data, social media, and wastewater monitoring.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAccurate forecasts can enable more effective public health responses during seasonal influenza epidemics. Forecasting teams were asked to provide national and jurisdiction-specific probabilistic predictions of weekly confirmed influenza hospital admissions for one through four weeks ahead for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 influenza seasons. Across both seasons, 26 teams submitted forecasts, with the submitting teams varying between seasons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The outbreak of Coronavirus disease, which originated in Wuhan, China in 2019, has affected the lives of billions of people globally. Throughout 2020, the reproduction number of COVID-19 was widely used by decision-makers to explain their strategies to control the pandemic.
Methods: In this work, we deduce and analyze both initial and effective reproduction numbers for 12 diverse world regions between February and December of 2020.
Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) were implemented all around the world in the fight against COVID-19: Social distancing, shelter-in-place, mask wearing, etc. to mitigate transmission, together with testing and contact-tracing to identify, isolate and treat the infected. The majority of countries have relied on the former measures, followed by a ramping up of their testing and tracing capabilities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: School testing for SARS-CoV-2 infection has become an important policy and planning issue as schools were reopened after the summer season and as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. Decisions to test or not to test and, if testing, how many tests, how often and for how long, are complex decisions that need to be taken under uncertainty and conflicting pressures from various stakeholders.
Method: We have developed an agent-based model and simulation tool that can be used to analyze the outcomes and effectiveness of different testing strategies and scenarios in schools with various number of classrooms and class sizes.
Background And Aims: Elimination of hepatitis C worldwide is more feasible if micro-elimination screening strategies are adopted. We aimed to screen hepatitis C virus (HCV) in specific high-risk populations in certain sub-regions of Romania and link them to antiviral treatment.
Methods: A multicenter prospective study was conducted among the hospitalized or ambulatory adult patients from March 2019 to March 2020 in more than 20 medical institutions from 4 Romanian cities (Bucharest, Iasi, Timisoara, Cluj-Napoca).
We investigate and generalize an existing model of competitive helping within a biological market, first introduced for a population of competing individuals in which one individual provides help to all others; the rest compete for the help available from this individual by providing help themselves. Our generalized model comprises two strategies in which each individual of a specific type provides the same amount of help as all other individuals of that type. Each individual's fitness function is dependent on this level of help, the cost of providing the help, and the fact that help is proportionally reciprocated by other individuals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere has been growing use of highly active antiretroviral treatment (HAART) for HIV and significant progress in developing prophylactic HIV vaccines. The simplest theories of counterproductive behavioral responses to such interventions tend to focus on single feedback mechanisms: for instance, HAART optimism makes infection less scary and thus promotes risky sexual behavior. Here, we develop an agent based, age-structured model of HIV transmission, risk perception, and partner selection in a core group to explore behavioral responses to interventions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRisk perception shapes individual behaviour, and is in turn shaped by the consequences of that behaviour. Here we explore this dynamics in the context of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) spread. We construct a simplified agent-based model based on a partner selection game, where individuals are paired with others in the population, and through a decision tree, agree on unprotected sex, protected sex, or no sex.
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