JMIR Public Health and Surveillance

Long-term surveillance of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) survivors is increasingly important, but patients who survive a second OHCA are rarely characterized because of the scarcity of such cases. The nationwide claims-based health data provide an opportunity to identify this uncommon survivor population and evaluate postdischarge outcomes at the population level. Understanding the prognosis and care needs of second-time OHCA survivors may help inform postarrest surveillance, risk stratification, and long-term care planning.

Across Africa, substantial investment has built national health information systems (HISs), including the surveillance platforms, reporting tools, and digital infrastructure through which health data flow. However, the health informatics capacity needed to sustain those systems remains fragile: trained health informaticians leave for better-resourced organizations, platforms fall into disrepair when donor funding ends, and data systems multiply without connecting. Health informatics is the discipline that designs, governs, and sustains HISs; the two are inseparable, and investment that builds one while neglecting the other cannot produce durable results. This viewpoint, grounded in the authors’ direct implementation experience across sub-Saharan Africa and informed by published literature, argues that the cause is a structurally misaligned investment logic: resources concentrate on training health informaticians while the institutional, governance, and infrastructure conditions that determine whether those informaticians can perform are chronically underfunded. We propose that sustainable health informatics capacity requires a functioning HIS ecosystem and that this ecosystem rests on four interdependent pillars: (1) workforce development beyond training; (2) institutional strengthening; (3) governance and data standards; and (4) interoperable infrastructure, including the national HIS platforms, such as the District Health Information Software 2, through which health informatics practice operates. The pillars are interdependent: weakness in any one undermines the others in specific, predictable ways. The framework makes 3 contributions beyond existing World Health Organization (WHO) and Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention frameworks: it shows how weakness in one pillar actively undermines the others; it focuses specifically on health informatics and national HISs as the primary investment domain rather than as components of a broader digital health agenda; and it treats the enabling environment, specifically civil service structures, domestic financing, data sovereignty, and artificial intelligence governance, as core investment requirements rather than background conditions. Drawing on illustrative experiences from Ethiopia, Kenya, and Sierra Leone, we show how health informatics capacity succeeds or fails depending on the strength of all 4 conditions. A practical readiness checklist and audience-specific policy recommendations are provided for national health ministries, national public health institutes, regional bodies, and development partners.

Ensuring affordable and quality primary health care for urban populations remains a persistent challenge in resource-constrained countries such as Bangladesh. The country’s fragmented and pluralistic urban health system exacerbates these challenges, making it particularly difficult to deliver primary health care to urban residents. In Bangladesh, the Aalo Clinic has been piloted to provide essential health services to low-income urban residents, including slum dwellers.

In South Korea, where plain packaging has not been adopted, tobacco packaging continues to function as a key marketing tool for the tobacco industry, using texts, colors, and imagery to attract consumers. Among these, flavor cues are especially important as they enhance product appeal. Cigarette sticks also serve marketing functions through design features such as colors and capsule indicators.

Sudden death due to cardiorespiratory arrest has a high mortality rate and often occurs outside hospital settings. Prompt initiation of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) by bystanders, along with the use of an automated external defibrillator (AED), has been shown to double survival rates. Given the challenges of ensuring timely emergency response in rural areas, implementing basic CPR training programs can help improve survival outcomes.

Geospatial analysis plays an essential role in informing targeted human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) intervention. The Dai-Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture of Dehong (hereinafter referred to as Dehong), located along the China-Myanmar border in the Yunnan province, has been heavily impacted by HIV infection. Given the complex local epidemic context, particularly frequent cross-border population movement, there is an urgent need to apply spatiotemporal analytical approaches to guiding resource allocation. Existing evidence has demonstrated the substantial spatial variations of newly diagnosed HIV infection this region. However, these spatiotemporal variations have not been fully explored at a finer geographic and temporal resolution.

Visceral fat content, a key indicator of obesity, has been increasingly linked to chronic lung diseases (CLDs). However, the precise relationship between the Chinese visceral adiposity index (CVAI) and CLD remains unclear.

Rural US communities experience disproportionately high rates of visual disability yet have limited access to ophthalmologists. Teleophthalmology may help address these gaps, but its effectiveness depends on broadband connectivity. The relationship between broadband access and ophthalmologist density has not been well characterized.

Although health care providers are the most trusted sources of health information, service establishments within communities represent important, yet underused, sources of health information. Specifically, food and beauty establishments can act as alternative settings for health communication, facilitating broader engagement with the general population.

The endemic channel is a surveillance method that presents statistical indicators and visual representations of a disease’s historical dynamics. Its epidemic curve defines the central tendency of cases and their expected variation, providing 3 levels (ie, “safety,” “warning,” and “epidemic”) to assess the epidemiological status of a region. Parameters include the central tendency used as the epidemiological warning threshold (EWT), the size of the retrospective window, and the handling of previous outbreaks and zero values in data. The absence of clear guidelines for the selection of these parameters may compromise reproducibility and hinder outbreak definitions and responses for endemic diseases such as dengue.

Accurate small-area estimates of vaccination rates and disease burden can inform public health interventions.

With global aging, the burden of tuberculosis (TB) among older adults escalates, yet spatial studies on this group are scarce. In Chongqing, where 18.87% of the population are aged 65 years and older and TB burden is high, controlling older adult TB remains a major challenge.