On 6 December 2013, two laboratory-confirmed cases of chikungunya without a travel history were reported on the French part of the Caribbean island of Saint Martin, indicating the start of the first ...documented outbreak of chikungunya in the Americas. Since this report, the virus spread to several Caribbean islands and French Guiana, and between 6 December 2013 and 27 March 2014 more than 17,000 suspected and confirmed cases have been reported. Further spread and establishment of the disease in the Americas is likely, given the high number of people travelling between the affected and non-affected areas and the widespread occurrence of efficient vectors. Also, the likelihood of the introduction of the virus into Europe from the Americas and subsequent transmission should be considered especially in the context of the next mosquito season in Europe. Clinicians should be aware that, besides dengue, chikungunya should be carefully considered among travellers currently returning from the Caribbean region.
Detecting planar structures in point clouds is a very central step of the point cloud processing pipeline as many Lidar scans, in particular in anthropic environments, present such planar structures. ...Many improvements have been proposed to RANSAC and the Hough transform, the two major types of plane detection methods. An important limitation however is that these methods detect planes running across the whole scene instead of more localized planar patches. Moreover, they do not exploit the sensor information that often comes with Lidar point cloud (sensor topology and optical center position in particular). In this paper we address both issues: we aim at detecting planar polygons that have a limited spatial extent, and we exploit sensor topology. The latter is used to enhance a RANSAC framework on two aspects: to make seed points selection more local and to define more compact sets of inliers through sensor space region growing.
Raw milk cheeses are commonly consumed in France and are also a common source of foodborne outbreaks (FBOs). Both an FBO surveillance system and a laboratory-based surveillance system aim to detect ...Salmonella outbreaks. In early August 2018, five familial FBOs due to Salmonella spp. were reported to a regional health authority. Investigation identified common exposure to a raw goats' milk cheese, from which Salmonella spp. were also isolated, leading to an international product recall. Three weeks later, on 22 August, a national increase in Salmonella Newport ST118 was detected through laboratory surveillance. Concomitantly isolates from the earlier familial clusters were confirmed as S. Newport ST118. Interviews with a selection of the laboratory-identified cases revealed exposure to the same cheese, including exposure to batches not included in the previous recall, leading to an expansion of the recall. The outbreak affected 153 cases, including six cases in Scotland. S. Newport was detected in the cheese and in the milk of one of the producer's goats. The difference in the two alerts generated by this outbreak highlight the timeliness of the FBO system and the precision of the laboratory-based surveillance system. It is also a reminder of the risks associated with raw milk cheeses.
Railroad environments are peculiar, as they combine dense urban areas, along with rural parts. They also display a very specific spatial organization. In order to monitor a railway network a at ...country scale, LiDAR sensors can be equipped on a running train, performing a full acquisition of the network. Then most processing steps are manually done. In this paper, we propose to improve performances and production flow by creating a classification of the acquired data. However, there exists no public benchmark, and little work on LiDAR data classification in railroad environments. Thus, we propose a weakly supervised method for the pointwise classification of such data. We show that our method can be improved by using the l0-cut pursuit algorithm and regularize the noisy pointwise classification on the produced segmentation. As production is envisaged in our context, we designed our implementation such that it is computationally efficient. We evaluate our results against a manual classification, and show that our method can reach a FScore of 0.96 with just a few samples of each class.
During the summer of 2014, all the pre-requisites for autochthonous transmission of chikungunya virus are present in southern France: a competent vector, Aedes albopictus, and a large number of ...travellers returning from the French Caribbean islands where an outbreak is occurring. We describe the system implemented for the surveillance of chikungunya and dengue in mainland France. From 2 May to 4 July 2014, there were 126 laboratory-confirmed imported chikungunya cases in mainland France.
In June 2009, for the first time in France, a confirmed outbreak of influenza A(H1N1)v without history of travel occurred in a secondary school in Toulouse district. A total of 15 cases were ...confirmed among students of which three were asymptomatic. This report describes the outbreak and its public health implications.
During summer 2016, all the conditions for local mosquito-borne transmission of Zika virus (ZIKV) are met in mainland France: a competent vector, Aedes albopictus, a large number of travellers ...returning from ZIKV-affected areas, and an immunologically naive population. From 1 January to 15 July 2016, 625 persons with evidence of recent ZIKV infection were reported in mainland France. We describe the surveillance system in place and control measures implemented to reduce the risk of infection.
Objective:To analyse in the general population the prevalence and predictors of symptomatology consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder (S-PTSD) 18 months after an industrial ...explosion.Design:Cross-sectional survey.Participants and outcome measures:A random sample of 1191 city inhabitants, including an oversample of the immediate area (<3 km). S-PTSD was measured by the self-administered Impact of Event Scale-Revised. The relation between S-PTSD and individual vulnerability factors, immediate exposure and post-trauma factors was analysed by gender.Results:S-PTSD was more prevalent in the immediate area than in the peripheral area (women 19% vs 8%; men 8% vs 2%, p<0.01). In the immediate area, S-PTSD was independently associated with birth outside France (men: ORa = 13.9, 95% CI 3.7 to 52.8; women: ORa = 2.1, 95% CI 1.0 to 4.2), age more than 40 years (men: ORa = 4.3, 95% CI 1.01 to 18.2; women: ORa = 2.3, 95% CI 1.1 to 4.5), previous psychotropic treatment (men: ORa = 11.5, 95% CI 2.4 to 53.6), proximity to the explosion (less educated men only) (ORa = 9.3, 95% CI 1.9 to 44.7), rescue efforts (men: ORa = 5.2, 95% CI 1.5 to 18.2), temporarily uninhabitable home (men: ORa = 5.8, 95% CI 1.9 to 18.1), personal injury (women: ORa = 3.7, 95% CI 1.7 to 8.4), financial difficulties (men: ORa = 17.4, 95% CI 4.2 to 72.1; women: ORa = 3.4, 95% CI 1.7 to 7.1) and inconvenience due to closure of public services (women: ORa = 4.1, 95% CI 1.6 to 9.9).Conclusions:Individual vulnerability, exposure and post-trauma factors were associated with S-PTSD. Vulnerable subgroups, defined by low socioeconomic characteristics may warrant focused screening after such disasters.
Background: A major explosion occurred in the AZF chemical factory in Toulouse in September 2001. A comprehensive programme of epidemiological surveillance was set up. Objectives: To present an ...overview of the programme and discuss the methods and potential utility of post-disaster epidemiology. The programme had three objectives: (1) to analyse comprehensively the short-term and long-term effects of air, water and secondary soil pollution on health; (2) to identify health problems needing special attention; and (3) to investigate the long-term direct and indirect effects on the population’s health. Methods: The programme was organised through three committees: (1) a scientific committee, (2) an executive programme committee and (3) an institutional committee which aimed to facilitate exchanges between the epidemiologists, the regional authorities, the population and the media. As the catastrophe was an industrial disaster that had a major effect on workers and companies, and also caused severe damage to many schools and buildings all over the city, routine and ad hoc surveillance systems were used and three specific ad hoc questionnaire surveys in workers, schoolchildren and the general population were planned. Results and Conclusions: Although the routine surveillance systems had limitations, several sources provided useful information for public health decisions and were found to be concordant with ad hoc epidemiological studies. Defining a victim was central to the choice of a programme design based on an approach either to victims of the disaster or to the entire population in the surrounding region. Anticipation and preparation for such disasters are thus required.
No gold standard exists for histopathological diagnosis of a prosthetic joint infection (PJI). The historical criterion considers the presence of neutrophil infiltration upon examination of ...periprosthetic tissue. Morawietz et al. proposed a classification of periprosthetic membranes (Morawietz et al., Clin Pathol 59:591-597, 2006, https://doi.org/10.1136/jcp.2005.027458) and a more recently described classification with a new cutoff value of 23 neutrophils in 10 high-power fields (Morawietz et al., Histopathology 54:847-853, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2559.2009.03313.x). We performed a multicenter prospective study, which compared both methods for the diagnosis of PJI. All suspicions of PJI (
= 264) between December 2010 and March 2012 in seven centers were prospectively included. Five perioperative specimens were collected per patient for cultures, and one was collected for histology. Diagnosis of PJI was made according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) guidelines. Histopathological analysis classified the patients according to the threshold of 23 neutrophils and according to the classification of Morawietz. Performances of both methods were compared by using clinical and/or bacteriological criteria as the gold standard. Among 264 patients with suspected PJI, a diagnosis of infection was confirmed in 215 and unconfirmed in 49 patients. Histopathological analysis was available for 150 confirmed PJI and 40 unconfirmed PJI cases. The sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and accuracy were 78.7%, 90.0%, 96.7%, 52.9%, and 81.1%, respectively, for the Morawietz classification, and 82.0%, 90.0%, 96.9%, 57.1%, and 83.7%, respectively, for the 23-neutrophil threshold. The new algorithm using a threshold of 23 neutrophils can be proposed as a new gold standard for the histopathological diagnosis of PJI.
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