Cause of Death ; Child ; Child, Preschool ; China ; epidemiology ; Female ; Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease ; epidemiology ; mortality ; Humans ; Infant ; Male

We identified the routes of infection and evaluate the effect of disinfection on the field of an outbreak of an-thrax in a village of Wengan County ,Guizhou ,China ,thus trying to provide with basis for the implementation of policies for pre-vention and control of anthrax .The authors gathered the cases information by searching and interviewing the targeted persons house by house ,and reviewed the medical records in hospitals .The samples including patient’s discharging fluid ,residues of died horse ,and soil from the places where the villagers dismembered horse were gathered and cultured for Bacillus anthracis . The technique of multiple-locus variable-number tandem repeat analysis (MLVA-8) was applied for revealing the genetic rela-tionships among those isolated Bacillus anthracis strains .Five cases of cutaneous anthrax occurred in the outbreak and the total attack rate was 7 .58% (5/66) among those contactors evolved in the activity of carrying ,dismembering ,washing ,chopping and eating the died horse .The attack rate was 100% (3/3) for those who carried ,dismembered ,washed ,chopped and ate that horse ,100% (1/1) for those who carried ,dismembered and ate ,and 7 .14% (1/14) for those who washed ,chopped and ate . The 25% (1/4) of the samples of discharging fluid from the cases with cutaneous anthrax were positive .After disinfection , 15 .38% (4/26) of the soil samples retained positive .The genetic similarity was 100% among the 5 isolate strains .The results suggested that the outbreak of anthrax in villagers occurred through the activities of carrying ,dismembering ,washing and chop-ping the died horse .Strengthening the risk communication and disinfection of the dismemberment places should be the crucial strategies to prevent and control anthrax epidemics in Guizhou in the future .

Transcriptional phenotypic drug discovery has achieved great success,and various com-pound perturbation-based data resources,such as connectivity map(CMap)and library of inte-grated network-based cellular signatures(LINCS),have been presented.Computational strategies fully mining these resources for phenotypic drug discovery have been proposed.Among them,the fundamental issue is to define the proper similarity between transcriptional profiles.Tra-ditionally,such similarity has been defined in an unsupervised way.However,due to the high dimensionality and the existence of high noise in high-throughput data,similarity defined in the tra-ditional way lacks robustness and has limited performance.To this end,we present DrSim,which is a learning-based framework that automatically infers similarity rather than defining it.We evalu-ated DrSim on publicly available in vitro and in vivo datasets in drug annotation and repositioning.The results indicated that DrSim outperforms the existing methods.In conclusion,by learning tran-scriptional similarity,DrSim facilitates the broad utility of high-throughput transcriptional pertur-bation data for phenotypic drug discovery.The source code and manual of DrSim are available at https://github.com/bm2-lab/DrSim/.

Objective This study was to evaluate the effects of prevention and control regarding programs on typhoid fever and paratyphoid fever,in Guizhou province,from 2007 to 2012, to provide evidence for the improvement of related programs. Methods Data on typhoid fever and paratyphoid including information on epidemics,individual,cases,measures for prevention and control programs taken and relative government documents were collected and analyzed in Guizhou province,from 2007 to 2012. Information related to the average annual incidence,nature of outbreaks, time span before confirmed diagnosis was made,unit which carried the case report,proportion of laboratory confirmed diagnosed cases and case-management were compared between 2007-2009 and 2010-2012 descriptively while chi-square test with Excelland EpiInfo software were used for data analysis. Results In the period of 2007-2009,a total of 5 978 typhoid fever and paratyphoid fever cases were reported in Guizhou province with the average yearly incidence as 5.29/100 000. In the period of 2010-2012,2 765 cases were reported with the average yearly incidence as 2.57/100 000. When compared to the former,data from the latter period showed that the average yearly incidence had declined 51.31% in all the prefectures. There were still some outbreaks appeared but the total number of cases involved reduced 87.50%. The time span before the confirmation of diagnosis became shorter but the difference was not statistically significant (χ 2=0.08,P=0.99). Number of cases reported by hospitals at county or above had 11.51% of increase while those cases reported at the township hospitals or below decreased for 61.47%. The proportion of laboratory diagnosed cases increased 23.63%. Rates of timeliness on cards being filled in,inputted and audited showed increase of 8.44%,6.76%and 2.40%respectively. Conclusion Successful measures for prevention and control on typhoid fever and paratyphoid fever had been remarkably taken in Guizhou province,but the potential risk of outbreaks still existed in some areas,suggesting that health education and surveillance programs including laboratory diagnosis,should be strengthened.

OBJECTIVEThis study was to evaluate the effects of prevention and control regarding programs on typhoid fever and paratyphoid fever, in Guizhou province, from 2007 to 2012, to provide evidence for the improvement of related programs.

METHODSData on typhoid fever and paratyphoid including information on epidemics, individual, cases, measures for prevention and control programs taken and relative government documents were collected and analyzed in Guizhou province, from 2007 to 2012. Information related to the average annual incidence, nature of outbreaks, time span before confirmed diagnosis was made, unit which carried the case report, proportion of laboratory confirmed diagnosed cases and case-management were compared between 2007-2009 and 2010-2012 descriptively while chi-square test with Excel and EpiInfo software were used for data analysis.

RESULTSIn the period of 2007-2009, a total of 5 978 typhoid fever and paratyphoid fever cases were reported in Guizhou province with the average yearly incidence as 5.29/100 000. In the period of 2010-2012, 2 765 cases were reported with the average yearly incidence as 2.57/100 000. When compared to the former, data from the latter period showed that the average yearly incidence had declined 51.31% in all the prefectures. There were still some outbreaks appeared but the total number of cases involved reduced 87.50%. The time span before the confirmation of diagnosis became shorter but the difference was not statistically significant (χ² = 0.08, P = 0.99). Number of cases reported by hospitals at county or above had 11.51% of increase while those cases reported at the township hospitals or below decreased for 61.47% . The proportion of laboratory diagnosed cases increased 23.63%. Rates of timeliness on cards being filled in, input and audited showed increase of 8.44%, 6.76% and 2.40% respectively.

CONCLUSIONSuccessful measures for prevention and control on typhoid fever and paratyphoid fever had been remarkably taken in Guizhou province, but the potential risk of outbreaks still existed in some areas, suggesting that health education and surveillance programs including laboratory diagnosis, should be strengthened.

China ; epidemiology ; Communicable Disease Control ; methods ; Humans ; Paratyphoid Fever ; epidemiology ; prevention & control ; Typhoid Fever ; epidemiology ; prevention & control