No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Surveillance for possible international infectious disease threats to the Olympic and Paralympic Games in London, United Kingdom, was conducted from 2 July to 12 September 2012 by a collaborative team comprising representatives from the Health Protection Agency (Public Health England since April 2013), the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the National Travel Health Network and Centre. Team members enhanced their usual international surveillance activities and undertook joint risk assessments of incidents identified as relevant through an agreed set of criteria designed for the Games and using tools developed for this purpose. Although team members responded to a range of international disease incidents as part of their routine roles during this period, no incident was identified that represented a threat to the Games. Six incidents were highlighted by the team that were likely to attract media attention and hence could generate political and public concern. Responding to such concern is an important aspect of the overall public health management of mass gathering events. The lessons learned about the process and outcomes of the enhanced international surveillance will help inform planning by future hosts of similar events.

ObjectivesThe Zika virus (ZIKV) outbreak in the Americas in 2015–2016 posed a novel global threat due to the association with congenital malformations and its rapid spread. Timely information about the spread of the disease was paramount to public health bodies issuing travel advisories. This paper looks at the online interaction with a national travel health website during the outbreak and compares this to trends in internet searches and news media output.MethodsTime trends were created for weekly views of ZIKV-related pages on a UK travel health website, relative search volumes for ‘Zika’ on Google UK, ZIKV-related items aggregated by Google UK News and rank of ZIKV travel advisories among all other pages between 15 November 2015 and 20 August 2016.ResultsTime trends in traffic to the travel health website corresponded with Google searches, but less so with media items due to intense coverage of the Rio Olympics. Travel advisories for pregnant women were issued from 7 December 2015 and began to increase in popularity (rank) from early January 2016, weeks before a surge in interest as measured by Google searches/news items at the end of January 2016.ConclusionsThe study showed an amplification of perceived risk among users of a national travel health website weeks before the initial surge in public interest. This suggests a potential value for tools to detect changes in online information seeking behaviours for predicting periods of high demand where the routine capability of travel health services could be exceeded.