Learning from history of natural disasters in the Sahel: a comprehensive analysis and lessons for future resilience.

One of the first environmental crises to attract interest in development initiatives and aid was the great drought of the 1970s in the Sahel. This study investigates the extent of damage caused by natural disasters from one of the most widely used databases-EM-DAT-with a sample size of 16 Sahelian countries over the period 1960-2020. These countries have been divided into three regions: Western Africa Sahel (WAS), Central Africa Sahel (CAS), and Eastern Africa Sahel (EAS).

Bayesian hierarchical models for disease mapping applied to contagious pathologies.

Disease mapping aims to determine the underlying disease risk from scattered epidemiological data and to represent it on a smoothed colored map. This methodology is based on Bayesian inference and is classically dedicated to non-infectious diseases whose incidence is low and whose cases distribution is spatially (and eventually temporally) structured. Over the last decades, disease mapping has received many major improvements to extend its scope of application: integrating the temporal dimension, dealing with missing data, taking into account various a prioris (environmental and population covariates, assumptions concerning the repartition and the evolution of the risk), dealing with overdispersion, etc.

Waterborne disease outbreak detection: an integrated approach using health administrative databases.

Hundreds of waterborne disease outbreaks (WBDO) of acute gastroenteritis (AGI) due to contaminated tap water are reported in developed countries each year. Such outbreaks are probably under-detected. The aim of our study was to develop an integrated approach to detect and study clusters of AGI in geographical areas with homogeneous exposure to drinking water.

Prevalence of rheumatic heart disease in Senegalese school children: a clinical and echocardiographic screening.

Objective: To study the prevalence of rheumatic heart disease (RHD) in schools (locally referred to as 'daaras') located in the city of Dakar and its suburbs using both clinical examination and echocardiography.

Methods: This is a cross-sectional study conducted from 9 August to 24 December 2011 involving 2019 pupils, aged between 5 and 18 years selected from the 16 'daaras' of the Academic Inspectorate (Inspection d'Académie) of the city of Dakar and its suburbs. Anamnestic, clinical and echocardiographic data were collected and entered into a questionnaire designed for the study.