RESUMEN
Background: Invasive group A streptococcal disease (iGAS) is caused by Streptococcus pyogenes group A bacteria. In 2022, multiple disease alerts for iGAS in the Island Health region, in the context of increased infections in the paediatric population in Europe and the United States, prompted further investigation into local trends. This surveillance study summarizes epidemiological trends of iGAS in the region covered by Island Health, a regional health authority in British Columbia, in 2022. Methods: In British Columbia, iGAS is a reportable disease; all confirmed cases are reported to the regional authority and the provincial health authority (BC Centre for Disease Control). Island Health's iGAS surveillance system is passive and collects information on cases that are identified through laboratory testing. Surveillance data were summarized for 2022 and compared with historical data from 2017-2021. Results: In 2022, the incidence rate was 11.4 cases per 100,000 population (n=101), the highest observed rate in the last six years. The median age of cases was 53 years, with a range of 0-96 years, and 64% of cases were male. The highest risk of infection was reported in men 40-59 years of age, with an incidence rate of 21.3 cases per 100,000 population. The most common emm types were emm92 (n=14), emm49 (n=13), and emm83 (n=12). Overall, 85% (n=86) of cases were hospitalized, 21% (n=21) were admitted to the intensive care unit, and 6% (n=6) died. Conclusion: This study highlights that the incidence of iGAS in the Island Health region continued to increase throughout the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, reaching its highest annual rate in 2022. In contrast to reports from Europe and the United States, there was no notable increase in infections in the paediatric population. Given the sustained increase in iGAS activity, continued monitoring and description of the epidemiology of these cases on a regular basis is imperative.
RESUMEN
In his article, "An alternative to null-hypothesis significance tests," Killeen (2005) urged the discipline to abandon the practice of p obs-based null hypothesis testing and to quantify the signal-to-noise characteristics of experimental outcomes with replication probabilities. He described the coefficient that he invented, prep, as the probability of obtaining "an effect of the same sign as that found in an original experiment" (Killeen, 2005, p. 346). The journal Psychological Science quickly came to encourage researchers to employ prep, rather than p obs, in the reporting of their experimental findings. In the current article, we (a) establish that Killeen's derivation of prep contains an error, the result of which is that prep is not, in fact, the probability that Killeen set out to derive; (b) establish that prep is not a replication probability of any kind but, rather, is a quasi-power coefficient; and (c) suggest that Killeen has mischaracterized both the relationship between replication probabilities and statistical inference, and the kinds of claims that are licensed by knowledge of the value assumed by the replication probability that he attempted to derive.