The Global Plan to Stop TB 2006-2015 is a road map for policy-makers and managers of national programmes. It sets out the key actions needed to achieve the targets of the Millennium Development Goals ...relating to tuberculosis (TB): to halve the prevalence and deaths by 2015 relative to 1990 levels and to save 14 million lives. Developed by a broad coalition of partners, the plan presents a model approach combining interventions that can feasibly be supplied on the ground. The main areas of activity set out in the plan are: scaling up interventions to control tuberculosis; promoting the research and development of improved diagnostics, drugs and vaccines; and engaging in related activities for advocacy, communications and social mobilization. Scenarios for the planning process were developed; these looked at issues both globally and in seven epidemiological regions. The scenarios made ambitious but realistic assumptions about the pace of scale-up and implementation coverage of the activities. A mathematical model was used to estimate the impact of scaling up current interventions based on data from studies of tuberculosis biology and from experience with tuberculosis control in diverse settings. The estimated costs of the activities set out in the Global Plan were based on implementing interventions and researching and developing drugs, diagnostics and vaccines; these costs were US$ 56 billion over 10 years. When translated into cost per disability adjusted life year averted, these costs compare favourably with those of other public health interventions. This approach to planning for global tuberculosis control is a valuable example of developing plans to improve global health that has relevance for other health issues.
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Modeling the SARS Epidemic Dye, Chris; Gay, Nigel
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
06/2003, Volume:
300, Issue:
5627
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Epidemiologists are still trying to understand how and why the SARS coronavirus has spread so readily throughout Asia and certain other regions of the world. In their Perspective, Dye and Gay discuss ...two new reports that use available data about the course of SARS infection to model the SARS epidemic (Lipsitch et al., Riley et al.). PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
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Despite some notable successes in the control of infectious diseases, transmissible pathogens still pose an enormous threat to human and animal health. The ecological and evolutionary dynamics of ...infections play out on a wide range of interconnected temporal, organizational, and spatial scales, which span hours to months, cells to ecosystems, and local to global spread. Moreover, some pathogens are directly transmitted between individuals of a single species, whereas others circulate among multiple hosts, need arthropod vectors, or can survive in environmental reservoirs. Many factors, including increasing antimicrobial resistance, increased human connectivity and changeable human behavior, elevate prevention and control from matters of national policy to international challenge. In the face of this complexity, mathematical models offer valuable tools for synthesizing information to understand epidemiological patterns, and for developing quantitative evidence for decision-making in global health.
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Summary Reduction of active disease by preventive therapy has the potential to make an important contribution towards the goal of tuberculosis (TB) elimination. This report summarises discussions ...amongst a Working Group convened to consider areas of research that will be important in optimising the design and delivery of preventative therapies. The Working Group met in Cape Town on 26th February 2012, following presentation of results from the GC11 Grand Challenges in Global Health project to discover drugs for latent TB.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
It is desirable to have a model which takes as input a stream of audio and returns the action which the user is currently telling the machine to perform. Given a good set of labeled audio, it is ...relatively easy to train a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model to do this. However obtaining such a set of labeled audio is difficult. We present Aural2, a data collection and labeling infrastructure which helps users to quickly collect high value training data with which it trains an LSTM model to accurately transform a stream of audio into the probability, for any given action, that the user is currently telling Aural2 to perform it. The models trained by Aural2 are usually capable of correctly classifying the user's intent before the user has finished speaking; assuming latency to be measured from end of utterance, they have slight negative latency. Furthermore, the model will learn to integrate past context into its classifications, allowing it to learn to accurately solve the use-mention distinction, and ignore commands directed at other voice assistants, all without itself requiring the use of wake-words. We describe the architecture of Aural2, its advantages over existing systems, its failings, and future directions for development.
Temperatures without Fevers? Dye, Chris; Reiter, Paul
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
09/2000, Volume:
289, Issue:
5485
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Rogers and Randolph report in a study that the distribution of the parasite that causes the most severe form of malaria is unlikely to change much if the world gets hotter. The researchers' ...multivariate model is discussed.
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Studies of disease burden have reaffirmed that tuberculosis is among the top 10 causes of death in the world. The tuberculosis epidemic in most countries could eventually be brought under control by ...implementing the World Health Organization’s (WHO) directly observed therapy, short course (DOTS) strategy, although tuberculosis linked to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in Africa and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in the former Soviet Union urgently demand adaptations and extensions of DOTS. Most high-incidence countries have achieved treatment success rates approaching the WHO 85% target in pilot projects. In the long term, we may have better diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines to control the disease; for the next 5 years, the central problem in global tuberculosis control is to expand DOTS coverage in high-incidence countries. Improved case finding and diagnosis, coupled with best-practice short-course chemotherapy, could quickly and dramatically cut the number of years of healthy life lost due to tuberculosis, especially by preventing death.
Reply from C. Dye Dye, C
Trends in ecology & evolution (Amsterdam)
11, Issue:
12
Journal Article
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10.
Epidemiology. Modeling the SARS epidemic Dye, Chris; Gay, Nigel
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
2003-Jun-20, 20030620, Volume:
300, Issue:
5627
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
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