Search results for "Public health interventions"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
Spatio-temporal small area surveillance of the COVID-19 pandemic
2022
Abstract The emergence of COVID-19 requires new effective tools for epidemiological surveillance. Spatio-temporal disease mapping models, which allow dealing with small units of analysis, are a priority in this context. These models provide geographically detailed and temporally updated overviews of the current state of the pandemic, making public health interventions more effective. These models also allow estimating epidemiological indicators highly demanded for COVID-19 surveillance, such as the instantaneous reproduction number R t , even for small areas. In this paper, we propose a new spatio-temporal spline model particularly suited for COVID-19 surveillance, which allows estimating a…
The seasonality of three childhood infections in a pre-industrial society without schools
2021
AbstractBackgroundThe burden of many infectious diseases varies seasonally and a better understanding of the drivers of infectious disease seasonality would help to improve public health interventions. For directly transmitted highly-immunizing childhood infections, the leading hypothesis is that seasonality is strongly driven by social gatherings imposed by schools, with maxima and minima during school terms and holidays respectively. However, we currently have a poor understanding of the seasonality of childhood infections in societies without schools and whether these are driven by human social gatherings. Here, we used unique nationwide data consisting of >40 epidemics over 100 years…
Knowledge, opinions and attitudes of Italian mothers towards HPV vaccination and Pap test
2015
Aim This study evaluated the knowledge and attitudes of Italian mothers – whose daughters had been vaccinated in 2012 – towards primary (anti-HPV vaccination) and secondary (Pap test screening) cervical cancer prevention, as well as sources of information and mother-daughter communication on health issues. Methods The survey – part of a multicenter study carried out in 4 Italian cities (Ferrara, Rome, Cassino and Palermo) – was conducted through self-administered questionnaires. The first univariate analysis evaluated differences between mothers of under-18s and over-18s relative to knowledge and attitudes on HPV vaccination and Pap test. The second univariate analysis evaluated differences…