Outbreaks of Acute Gastrointestinal Illness Associated with a Splash Pad in a Wildlife Park - Kansas, June 2021.

In June 2021, Kansas state and county public health officials identified and investigated three cases of shigellosis (a bacterial diarrheal illness caused by Shigella spp.) associated with visiting a wildlife park. The park has animal exhibits and a splash pad. Two affected persons visited animal exhibits, and all three entered the splash pad. Nonhuman primates are the only known animal reservoir of Shigella. The splash pad, which sprays water on users and is designed so that water does not collect in the user area, was closed on June 19. The state and county public health codes do not include regulations for splash pads. Thus, these venues are not typically inspected, and environmental health expertise is limited. A case-control study identified two distinct outbreaks associated with the park (a shigellosis outbreak involving 21 cases and a subsequent norovirus infection outbreak involving six cases). Shigella and norovirus can be transmitted by contaminated water; in both outbreaks, illness was associated with getting splash pad water in the mouth (multiply imputed adjusted odds ratio [aORMI] = 6.4, p = 0.036; and 28.6, p = 0.006, respectively). Maintaining adequate water disinfection and environmental health expertise and targeting prevention efforts to caregivers of splash pad users help prevent splash pad-associated outbreaks. Outbreak incidence might be further reduced when U.S. jurisdicitons voluntarily adopt CDC's Model Aquatic Health Code (MAHC) recommendations and through the prevention messages: "Don't get in the water if sick with diarrhea," "Don't stand or sit above the jets," and "Don't swallow the water."†.

A database of multi-principal element alloy phase-specific mechanical properties measured with nano-indentation.

Multi-principal element alloys (MPEAs) have been the focus of study and computationally-guided design for two reasons. MPEAs have shown high strengths and, the vast potential compositional space is more efficiently navigated with machine learning. In this article, we present data from 7385 indentation tests performed on 19 different MPEAs. Samples were arc melted, a thermodynamically complex process forming many distinct phases within a sample. The database was generated by performing hundreds of nanoindentation tests on a given sample and registering the location of those indents with local phase compositions measured with energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS). The database contains the phases formed in the MPEA, the composition at the location of each indent, and the associated hardness (HV) and modulus for each indent. This data allows researchers targeting data-driven design of high strength systems to extract meaningful correlations between alloying composition, the resulting phases, and mechanical properties for future study.