Review

Authors: Kim A Hoffman, Javier Ponce Terashima, Dennis McCarty...

BACKGROUND

Addiction health service researchers have focused efforts on opioid use disorder (OUD) and strategies to address the emerging public health threats associated with the epidemics of opioid use and opioid overdose. The increase in OUD is associated with widespread access to prescription opioid analgesics, enhanced purity of heroin, the introduction of potent illicit fentanyl compounds, and a rising tide of opioid overdose fatalities. These deaths have become the face of the opioid epidemic.

MAIN TEXT

OUD is a chronic disorder that usually requires both medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) and psychosocial treatment and support. Research has found that MOUD with an opioid receptor agonist (methadone), partial agonist (buprenorphine), or opioid antagonist (extended-release naltrexone) can support recovery. Despite compelling evidence that MOUD are effective, they remain underutilized. More research is needed on these therapies to understand the feasibility of implementation in clinic settings.

CONCLUSION

This special issue focuses on how health services research has emerged as an important contributor to efforts to control the opioid epidemic in North America and Europe.

Topics: Epidemics; Europe; Health Services Research; Humans; North America; Opioid-Related Disorders

PubMed: 31767011
DOI: 10.1186/s12913-019-4751-4

Authors: Ben Ashby, Alex Best

Herd immunity is an important yet often misunderstood concept in epidemiology. As immunity accumulates in a population - naturally during the course of an epidemic or through vaccination - the spread of an infectious disease is limited by the depletion of susceptible hosts. If a sufficient proportion of the population is immune - above the 'herd immunity threshold' - then transmission generally cannot be sustained. Maintaining herd immunity is therefore critical to long-term disease control. In this primer, we discuss the concept of herd immunity from first principles, clarify common misconceptions, and consider the implications for disease control.

Topics: Animals; Communicable Disease Control; Epidemics; Humans; Immunity, Herd; Mice; Vaccination

PubMed: 33621500
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.01.006

Review

Authors: Ioannis Tsagkarliotis, Nikolaos P Rachaniotis

This paper explores the concept of a holistic approach in preventing and responding to epidemics. Epidemics are defined as the occurrence of an illness or health-related event exceeding normal expectations within a specific community or region. Holism emphasizes viewing systems as a whole rather than a collection of parts. In the context of epidemics, a holistic approach considers not only medical interventions but also social, economic, psychological and environmental factors that influence disease transmission and management. The impact of climate change on epidemic response, the understanding of the significance of animal health and agriculture, the consideration of art, culture and societal factors, the exploration of the use of technology and innovation, the addressing of limitations in resources and the provision of enhanced support for the mental and emotional well-being of individuals and affected communities, are parts of this holistic approach. By integrating them, innovative practices as well as cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary techniques can be employed. Such an approach has the potential to enhance epidemic prevention and response strategies, ultimately contributing to positive public health outcomes.

Topics: Humans; Epidemics; Public Health

PubMed: 38026383
DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2023.1263293

Authors: Yong Zhou, Minrui Guo

Among many epidemic prevention measures, isolation is an important method to control the spread of infectious disease. Scholars rarely study the impact of isolation on disease dissemination from a quantitative perspective. In this paper, we introduce an isolation ratio and establish the corresponding model. The basic reproductive number and its biological explanation are given. The stability conditions of the disease-free and endemic equilibria are obtained by analyzing its distribution of characteristic values. It is shown that the isolation ratio has an important influence on the basic reproductive number and the stability conditions. Taking the COVID-19 in Wuhan as an example, isolating more than 68% of the population can control the spread of the epidemic. This method can provide precise epidemic prevention strategies for government departments. Numerical simulations verify the effectiveness of the results.

Topics: Basic Reproduction Number; COVID-19; Communicable Diseases; Epidemics; Humans

PubMed: 36124572
DOI: 10.3934/mbe.2022507

Authors: Shinsuke Koyama

An infectious disease spreads not only over a single population or community but also across multiple and heterogeneous communities. Moreover, its transmissibility varies over time because of various factors such as seasonality and epidemic control, which results in strongly nonstationary behavior. In conventional methods for assessing transmissibility trends or changes, univariate time-varying reproduction numbers are calculated without taking into account transmission across multiple communities. In this paper, we propose a multivariate-count time series model for epidemics. We also propose a statistical method for estimating the transmission of infections across multiple communities and the time-varying reproduction numbers of each community simultaneously from a multivariate time series of case counts. We apply our method to incidence data for the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic to reveal the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of the epidemic process.

Topics: Humans; COVID-19; Time Factors; Epidemics; Communicable Diseases; Pandemics

PubMed: 37327242
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0287389

Review

Authors: Peng Cui, Ping Zou, Xuan Ju...

In the post-epidemic era, China's urban communities are at the forefront of implementing the whole chain of accurate epidemic prevention and control. However, the uncertainty of COVID-19, the loopholes in community management and people's overly optimistic judgment of the epidemic have led to the frequent rebound of the epidemic and serious consequences. Existing studies have not yet formed a panoramic framework of community anti-epidemic work under the concept of resilience. Therefore, this article first summarizes the current research progress of resilient communities from three perspectives, including ideas and perspectives, theories and frameworks and methods and means, and summarizes the gap of the current research. Then, an innovative idea on the epidemic resilience of urban communities in China is put forward: (1) the evolution mechanism of community anti-epidemic resilience is described through the change law of dynamic networks; (2) the anti-epidemic resilience of urban communities is evaluated or predicted through the measurement criteria; (3) a simulation platform based on Multi-Agent and dynamic Bayesian networks simulates the interactive relationship between "epidemic disturbance-cost constraint--epidemic resilience"; (4) the anti-epidemic strategies are output intelligently to provide community managers with decision-making opinions on community epidemic prevention and control.

Topics: Humans; Bayes Theorem; COVID-19; Epidemics; China

PubMed: 36430012
DOI: 10.3390/ijerph192215293

Review

Authors: Stanley A Plotkin

The author reviews the foundation of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations and the choices it has made for funding of vaccine development against epidemic diseases. He comments on those decisions as well as proposing how CEPI could remain relevant for the long term.

Topics: Capital Financing; Communicable Diseases; Drug Discovery; Epidemics; Humans; Vaccines

PubMed: 28375764
DOI: 10.1080/21645515.2017.1306615

Review

Authors: Mei Li, Haixue Zheng

The African swine fever virus (ASFV) is the only giant double-stranded DNA virus known to be transmitted by insect vectors. It can infect pigs and cause clinical signs such as high fever, bleeding, and splenomegaly, which has been classified as a reportable disease by the WOAH. In 2018, African swine fever (ASF) was introduced into China and rapidly spread to several countries in the Asia-Pacific region, with morbidity and mortality rates reaching 100 percent, resulting in significant economic losses to the global pig industry. Because ASFV has large genomes and a complex escape host mechanism, there are currently no safe and effective drugs or vaccines against it. Therefore, it is necessary to optimize vaccination procedures and find effective treatments by studying the epidemiology of ASFV to reduce economic losses. This article reviews research progress on pathogenesis, genome, proteome and transcriptome, pathogenic mechanisms, and comprehensive control measures of ASFV infection.

Topics: African Swine Fever; African Swine Fever Virus; Animals; Swine; Genome, Viral; Epidemics; Viral Vaccines

PubMed: 39937724
DOI: 10.1080/21505594.2025.2457949

Authors: Fangyuan Chen, Siya Chen, Weizhong Yang...

This paper presents a free-boundary epidemic model with subclinical infections and vaccination.We prove the existence and uniqueness of solutions to the model.Moreover, sufficient conditions for the disease vanishing and spreading are given.The disease will vanish if the basic reproduction number $ R_0 < 1 $, that the corresponding ODE model defines without spatial expansion. However, the disease will spread to the whole area if $ R^F_0(t_0) > 1 $ for some $ t_0 > 0 $ when it is introduced spatial heterogeneity. $ R^F_0(0) < R_0 $ implies that the spillovers from hotspots to areas with no confirmed cases will reduce the outbreak threshold and increase the difficulty of prevention and control in the whole region. Under the condition $ R^F_0(0) < 1 < R_0 $, if the free boundary condition of infectives $ h(t) < \infty $, $ t \to \infty $, then the disease is vanishing, which indicates that $ R^F_0(0) < 1 $ can also control the disease if the scope of hotspots expansion is limited. Furthermore, the numerical simulations illustrate that the routine vaccination would decrease the basic reproduction number and then change the disease from spreading to vanishing.

Topics: Asymptomatic Infections; Computer Simulation; Epidemics; Humans; Models, Biological; Vaccination

PubMed: 35730270
DOI: 10.3934/mbe.2022307

Authors: Bruce T Volpe

Topics: Central Nervous System Diseases; Epidemics; Humans

PubMed: 35674082
DOI: 10.1097/WCO.0000000000001056