Estimating the incidence reporting rates of new influenza pandemics at an early stage using travel data from the source country.

During the surveillance of influenza pandemics, underreported data are a public health challenge that complicates the understanding of pandemic threats and can undermine mitigation efforts. We propose a method to estimate incidence reporting rates at early stages of new influenza pandemics using 2009 pandemic H1N1 as an example. Routine surveillance data and statistics of travellers arriving from Mexico were used. Our method incorporates changes in reporting rates such as linearly increasing trends due to the enhanced surveillance. From our results, the reporting rate was estimated at 0·46% during early stages of the pandemic in Mexico. We estimated cumulative incidence in the Mexican population to be 0·7% compared to 0·003% reported by officials in Mexico at the end of April. This method could be useful in estimation of actual cases during new influenza pandemics for policy makers to better determine appropriate control measures.

A comparison of wound treatments in nasopharyngeal cancer patients receiving radiation therapy.

The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of gentian violet and nonadherent absorbent dressing in the healing of postirradiation wounds in nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients. This was a randomized controlled trial. A sample of 146 nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients who had developed postirradiation wounds was assessed. Comparisons were made regarding parameters related to wound healing, including healing time, presence of infection, and wound pain, and also regarding the impact of wound on the patient, including mood changes, restriction of neck movement, social isolation, sleep problem, and disturbance in body image. The results showed that patients in the 2 groups did not have any significant difference on wound-healing time, disturbance in mood, sleep, social interaction, appearance, and neck mobility. However, there was a trend of higher wound pain score, not reaching statistical significance, in the gentian violet group.