This study presents the development and validation of a risk assessment program of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). This program was developed by the Korean government (Animal and Plant Quarantine Agency) and a private corporation (Korea Telecom, KT), using a national database (Korean animal health integrated system, KAHIS).
Our risk assessment program was developed using the multilayer perceptron method using R Language. HPAI outbreaks on 544 poultry farms (307 with H5N6, and 237 with H5N8) that had available visit records of livestock-related vehicles amongst the 812 HPAI outbreaks that were confirmed between January 2014 and June 2017 were involved in this study.
After 140,000 iterations without drop-out, a model with 3 hidden layers and 10 nodes per layer, were selected. The activation function of the model was hyperbolic tangent. Precision and recall of the test gave F1 measures of 0.41, 0.68 and 0.51, respectively, at validation. The predicted risk values were higher for the “outbreak” (average ± SD, 0.20 ± 0.31) than “non-outbreak” (0.18 ± 0.30) farms (
The risk assessment model developed was employed during the epidemics of 2016/2017 (pilot version) and 2017/2018 (complementary version). This risk assessment model enhanced risk management activities by enabling preemptive control measures to prevent the spread of diseases.
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This study aims to evaluate the risk assessments of coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) in the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), from the point of detection to the provision of basic information to the relevant public health authorities.
To estimate the overall risk of specific public health events, probability, and impact at the country-level were evaluated using available information. To determine the probability of particular public health events, the risk of importation and risk of transmission were taken into consideration. KCDC used 5 levels (“very low,” “low,” “moderate,” “high,” and “very high”) for each category and overall risk was eventually decided.
A total of 8 risk assessments were performed on 8 separate occasions between January 8th to February 28th, 2020, depending on the detection and report of COVID-19 cases in other countries. The overall risk of the situation in each assessment increased in severity over this period: “low” (first), “moderate” (second), “high” (third), “high” (fourth), “high” (fifth), “high” (sixth), “high” (seventh), and “very high” (eighth).
The KCDC’s 8 risk assessments were utilized to activate national emergency response mechanisms and eventually prepare for the pandemic to ensure the containment and mitigation of COVID-19 with non-pharmaceutical public health measures.
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Aflatoxins are a category of poisonous compounds found in most plants, milk and dairy products. The present research was carried out to detect the presence of aflatoxin M1 (AFM1) in samples of milk collected from Hamadan province, Iran.
Twenty five samples of ultra-high temperature (UHT) and 63 samples of pasteurized milk were collected and the amount of AFM1 was measured by an Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay method. In addition, the estimated daily intake (EDI) and hazard index (HI) of AFM1 was determined by the following equations:(EDI= mean concentration of AFM1 × daily consumption of milk/body weight; HI= EDI/Tolerance Daily Intake).
AFM1 was detected in 21 (84%) UHT milk samples and in 55 (87.30%) pasteurized milk samples. Seven (28%) samples of UHT and 21 (33.33%) pasteurized milk samples had higher AFM1 content than the limit allowed in the European Union and Iranian National Standard Limits (0.05 μg/kg). None of the samples exceeded the US Food and Drug Administration limit (0.5 μg/kg) for AFM1. EDI and HI for AM1 through milk were 0.107 ng/kg body weight/day, and 0.535, respectively.
A significant percentage of milk produced by different factories in Iran (84% of UHT and 87.3% of pasteurized milk) was contaminated with AFM1. Therefore, more control and monitoring of livestock feeding in dairy companies may help reduce milk contamination with AFM1. As the HI value was lower than 1, it can be assumed that there was no risk of developing liver cancer due to milk consumption.
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