The COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated wastewater-based surveillance, allowing public health to track the epidemic by monitoring the concentration of the genetic fingerprints of SARS-CoV-2 shed in wastewater by infected individuals. Wastewater-based surveillance for COVID-19 is still in its infancy. In particular, the quantitative link between clinical cases observed through traditional surveillance and the signals from viral concentrations in wastewater is still developing and hampers interpretation of the data and actionable public-health decisions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Ontario, Canada introduced a publicly-funded 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV13) for infants in 2010, replacing the 10-valent (PCV10, 2009-2010) and the 7-valent (PCV7, 2005-2009) conjugate vaccine programs; a 23-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine (PPV23) has been available for older adults since 1996. We examined the epidemiology and serotype distribution of invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) in Ontario in the context of provincial immunization programs.
Methods: We included confirmed IPD cases reported in Ontario between 2007 and 2017.