Analysis of COVID-19 Risk Following a Ring Vaccination Intervention to Address SARS-CoV-2 Alpha Variant Transmission in Montreal, Canada.

Importance: Given limited COVID-19 vaccine availability early in the pandemic, optimizing immunization strategies was of paramount importance. Ring vaccination has been used successfully to control transmission of other airborne respiratory viruses.

Objective: To assess the association of a ring vaccination intervention on COVID-19 spread in the initial epicenter of SARS-CoV-2 Alpha variant transmission in Montreal, Canada.

Making sense of what exactly public health does: a typology of public health interventions.

Setting: Montréal.

Intervention: The lack of common knowledge about what public health does is a hindrance to its recognition and capacity to act. Montréal's regional public health department set an explicit goal to clarify and better communicate its specific contributions when it developed its 2016-2021 action plan.

[The critical reading of scientific articles, an easy-to-use method].

Faced with the abundance of available literature, clinicians must follow a method in order to carry out a critical reading of scientific articles. This enables them to decide how relevant the selected article is to the issues specific to their area of work and to choose whether to undertake a basic critical reading or to embark on an active reading.

Seeing is believing: an educational outreach activity on disinfection practices.

Background: Skin and soft-tissue infections are very common among persons who inject drugs. They occur when microbes pass under the protective layer of the skin and proliferate. This happens when harm reduction recommendations such as skin aseptia before injection and sterile injection equipment usage are not properly followed.