Biosurveillance and Dentistry

Abstract

The public health environment (like the rest of healthcare) is changing and incorporating digital strategies at the forefront of their responses to public health events and routine public health interventions. The H1N1 pandemic, SARS, Ebola epidemic, and Zika pandemic are recent global events of public health concern (Fineberg 2014;Dixon et al. 2014;Fauci and Morens 2016). In addition, other local crises such as the US opioid epidemic (US Department of Health and Human Services 2017), have reinforced the need to establish bidirectional communications between clinical practices and public health authorities. As a result, organized healthcare has established and adopted protocols to rapidly handle patients and related risks adequately. It is now common in clinical practices to hear the question "have you travelled abroad recently?" or "have you been to places experiencing a public health emergency?" Furthermore, guidance from public health authorities can be seen posted throughout halls or clinical spaces in practices. These messages and warnings are now also part of electronic health records and patients are questioned and treated accordingly. Public health authorities (federal, state, and local) continue to develop strategies to reach both clinicians and the general public and having the capacity to handle electronic health record data is a high priority for all of them.In the case of surveillance, there are a myriad of mechanisms to collect, distribute, and aggregate information (Groseclose and Buckeridge 2017). In addition, in the US, the public health surveillance effort is highly distributed where, depending on the type of condition, funding stream, and/or regulation, the authority and scope of responsibility of the different public health agencies is spread across geographical boundaries. Furthermore, local, state, and/or federal priorities can modify the way surveillance gets conducted. Whether responding to public health emergencies,

Monkeypox‐related oral manifestations and implications: Should dentists keep an eye out?

“…4 On top of that, dentists are well-positioned to aid national surveillance efforts in their respective countries as oral manifestations of infectious diseases, including smallpox and monkeypox, are of practical value for detection algorithms. 5 As reported in the 1972 outbreak of smallpox in Yugoslavia, tongue swelling, oral mucosal ulceration, and bleeding occurred at least 24 h before fever. 5 We performed a rapid literature review in Ovid MEDLINE ® , Embase, and Google Scholar using a combination of keywords ("monkeypox OR smallpox OR orthopoxvirus" AND "oral manifestations OR enanthem* OR oral mucosa") to explore the body of evidence on monkeypox-related oral manifestations.…”

“…5 As reported in the 1972 outbreak of smallpox in Yugoslavia, tongue swelling, oral mucosal ulceration, and bleeding occurred at least 24 h before fever. 5 We performed a rapid literature review in Ovid MEDLINE ® , Embase, and Google Scholar using a combination of keywords ("monkeypox OR smallpox OR orthopoxvirus" AND "oral manifestations OR enanthem* OR oral mucosa") to explore the body of evidence on monkeypox-related oral manifestations. Given the similarity of the clinical presentation, smallpox, monkeypox, and chickenpox were compared in Table 1.…”