JMIR Public Health and Surveillance

Mental distress represents a major public health challenge worldwide, affecting work ability, productivity, and social functioning. Public-sector employees face high psychosocial demands, but data on their mental health literacy and supportive behaviors remain scarce. Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) aims to improve knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors (KAB) toward psychological distress among nonspecialists, but evidence among civil servants and on skill retention over time is limited.

Depressive and anxiety symptoms are primary drivers of China’s mental health burden, with workplace psychological issues growing increasingly pronounced. However, evidence on industry-specific patterns of depressive and anxiety symptoms and their occupational determinants remains limited. Understanding these sector-specific differences is critical for pinpointing high-risk occupations and designing effective, tailored intervention strategies.

Antimicrobial resistance is a major public health threat globally, with disproportionate impact in low- and middle-income countries, where surveillance systems are often fragmented. In Iraq, nationally integrated multicenter resistance data to support stewardship policy and World Health Organization Access Watch Reserve (WHO AWaRe)–aligned interventions remain limited.

The range expansion of ticks transmitting zoonotic diseases in Canada poses challenges for public health surveillance. Active monitoring of where tick populations are emerging helps inform public health responses, but is resource intensive and logistically complex. Crowdsourced data may provide a cost-effective approach to augment surveillance. In this study, we assessed the value of crowdsourced data from eTick, a platform whereby the public submits tick photographs for expert identification.

COVID-19 profoundly affected emergency department (ED) services and patient outcomes. However, changes in ED length of stay (LOS) and intensive care unit (ICU) admission risk before, during, and after the pandemic remain poorly understood.

Infectious disease–specific health literacy (IDSHL)—the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic infectious disease information needed to make appropriate health decisions—is a critical determinant of public health outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic created an unprecedented global public health education context; yet, its long-term association with population-level IDSHL beyond the pandemic remains unclear. In China, stringent public health measures and digital information campaigns were implemented, yet their lasting impact on IDSHL across different disease domains has not been systematically evaluated over a full pandemic cycle.

Blood exposure accidents (BEAs) remain a major occupational hazard for health care providers, particularly in low‑resource settings. Despite their preventable nature, BEAs continue to occur frequently due to gaps in compliance with standard precautions and limited institutional surveillance.

Firearm mortality surveillance relies on aggregate demographic categories or low-dimensional stratifications, obscuring how race, ethnicity, sex, age, and intent intersect to shape risk among youth and young adults. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s transition to single-race population estimates created a structural break between historical and contemporary data series. Consequently, the 25-year trajectory of intersectional firearm mortality across changing federal classification frameworks remains uncharacterized.

On February 6, 2024, the Korean government announced an increase in medical school enrollment quotas, triggering a nationwide strike by medical residents that precipitated a severe health care crisis. Prehospital emergency medical service (EMS) providers were forced to transport patients to distant hospitals, resulting in some patients experiencing symptom deterioration or death due to delayed critical care. Recent studies have examined moral injury—a mental health response to events that undermine moral values—among EMS providers, with exposure to potentially morally injurious events increasing the likelihood of depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder. However, studies specifically examining the association between health care–related patient deterioration experiences caused by health care service disruptions and mental health outcomes among EMS providers remain limited.

Injuries are a major cause of death and disability, but cities often lack surveillance systems that can monitor injury burden across mechanisms, severity levels, and population groups. In Spain, no comprehensive city-level injury surveillance system routinely captures the full spectrum of injuries. The Barcelona Injury Surveillance System (BISS) was developed to address this gap by integrating routine health and police data.

An ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is a methodological framework designed to capture real-time data in a participant’s natural environment, yet its feasibility in older adults, particularly in a large, multisite study, remains underexplored.