JMIR Public Health and Surveillance

This study updates the initial COVID-19 pandemic surveillance in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) from 2020 by providing 2 additional years of data for the region.

Depression in children and adolescents is a rising concern in China. Dietary behavior is a critical determinant of mental health. Meal timing, the schedule of meal consumption, has been related to several metabolic disorders. However, the effect of meal timing on mental health is scarce, particularly in children and adolescents who are in a critical period of physical and psychological development.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) and neoplasms are leading causes of mortality worldwide.

Exposure to unhealthy food and beverage marketing is a major contributor to excessive weight gain among young people, and it may disproportionately affect Black and Latinx communities. Appropriate and comprehensive regulations on food and beverage companies are essential, particularly as companies expand their reach and leverage the latest technologies to create marketing experiences using immersive virtual reality (VR). Although immersive VR technology is in its infancy, the potential effects of immersive VR food and beverage marketing on consumption, coupled with the history of racially-targeted marketing by food and beverage corporations toward Black and Latinx communities, and the heightened burden of diet-related illnesses in Black and Latinx communities, underscores a critical need to investigate immersive VR marketing targeting young people of color. This viewpoint will provide a brief description of VR food and beverage marketing as the newest food and beverage marketing frontier, highlight key concerns and knowledge gaps, and underscore future directions in research.

With global warming, the number of days with extreme heat is expected to increase and may cause more acute heat illnesses. While decreasing emissions may mitigate the climate impacts, its effectiveness in reducing acute heat illnesses remains uncertain. Taiwan has established a real-time epidemic surveillance and early warning system to monitor the acute heat illnesses since Jan 1, 2011. Predicting the number of acute heat illnesses requires forecasting temperature changes that are influenced by adaptation policies.

Allergic diseases are associated with an increased susceptibility to respiratory tract infections. Although allergen immunotherapy (AIT) alters the course of allergies, there is limited evidence from clinical practice demonstrating its ability to enhance the host defense against pathogens.

Infectious diseases are among the leading causes of death and disability and are recognised as a major cause of health loss globally. At the same time, frailty as a geriatric syndrome is a rapidly growing major public health problem. However, few studies have investigated the incidence and risk of infectious diseases in frail elderly people. Thus, research on frailty and infectious diseases is an urgently needed.

Despite strong evidence supporting COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and safety, a proportion of the population remains hesitant to receive immunization. Discrete choice experiments (DCEs) can help assess preferences and decision-making drivers.

During the peak of the winter 2020-2021 surge, the number of weekly reported COVID-19 outbreaks in Washington State was 231; the majority occurred in high-priority settings such as workplaces, community settings, and schools. The Washington State Department of Health used automated address matching to identify clusters at health care facilities. No other systematic, statewide outbreak detection methods were in place. This was a gap given the high volume of cases, which delayed investigations and decreased data completeness, potentially leading to undetected outbreaks. We initiated statewide cluster detection using SaTScan, implementing a space-time permutation model to identify COVID-19 clusters for investigation.

Supporting and understanding the health of patients with chronic diseases and cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk is often a major challenge. Health data are often used in providing feedback to patients, and visualization plays an important role in facilitating the interpretation and understanding of data and, thus, influencing patients’ behavior. Visual analytics enable efficient analysis and understanding of large datasets in real time. Digital health technologies can promote healthy lifestyle choices and assist in estimating CVD risk.

Previous studies investigating environmental and behavioral drivers of chronic disease have often had limited temporal and spatial data coverage. Smartphone-based digital phenotyping mitigates the limitations of these studies by using intensive data collection schemes that take advantage of the widespread use of smartphones while allowing for less burdensome data collection and longer follow-up periods. In addition, smartphone apps can be programmed to conduct daily or intraday surveys on health behaviors and psychological well-being.

Aging, a significant public health issue, is associated with multiple concurrent chronic diseases and aging-related conditions (geriatric syndromes).