JMIR Public Health and Surveillance

Semiautomated web scraping and content analysis tools can be used to identify and summarize municipal climate reports, lending high-level insight into policy priorities across broad geographic and political units. A semiautomated content analysis of reports within the Greater Boston Inner Core uncovers homogeneity in climate priority and variation in community outreach efforts. Across the study area, reports highlighted floods and storms as focal hazards. Surveys and community meetings were common outreach tools, but municipalities varied in their approach. The analytic framework and tools used in this analysis may be of use to others seeking to improve existing environmental policy or coordinate policy decisions across communities.

The reemergence of the Zika virus, the novel coronavirus, and new influenza strains highlighted the urgent need for an organized forum to access specimens to advance research, diagnostics, and vaccine development. During the COVID-19 pandemic, gaps in supply chains, communication, and standards between local (federated) and centralized systems cost time and lives. The FAIR-VBS (Federated, Accessible, Inclusive, and Responsive Virtual Biorepository) was proposed to connect communities with samples, address specimen-sharing challenges, and promote inclusion and equity.

Unhealthy weight management behaviors (UWMBs) have become increasingly common among emerging adult women, yet prior research has largely focused on psychological or perceptual correlates in isolation. In appearance-oriented contexts, structural influences, including social norms, may co-occur with individual characteristics to shape these behaviors. The social determinants of health (SDOH) framework offers a useful lens for examining UWMBs by jointly considering structural and intermediary determinants.

Healthy lifestyle behaviors are key modifiable factors for the prevention of chronic diseases and premature mortality. Composite lifestyle scores provide a practical framework for capturing the combined impact of multiple health behaviors, but prospective evidence from multiethnic Asian populations remains limited.

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly altered global influenza transmission patterns. Whether the associations among meteorological conditions, visibility, and influenza subtype (A/H1N1, A/H3N2, and B/Victoria) positivity changed after the pandemic remains unclear. We compared these associations before and after the COVID-19 pandemic in northern China.

Public health surveillance (PHS) systems are essential for routine disease monitoring, early outbreak detection, and emergency response. Although many studies focus on system development and implementation, less attention has been given to factors that sustain surveillance systems over time.

Synthetic population and persona datasets can provide artificial individual-level records without exposing personal data. However, for surveillance use, they must preserve the joint profiles that define vulnerable groups, not only marginal distributions.

Tick-borne diseases (TBDs) in the United States are increasing due to ecological and climate changes. However, national surveillance data are principally available only at aggregate state and federal levels, limiting granular analysis and constraining TBD diagnosis, prevention, and public health communication. From a One Health perspective, recognizing the shared environments of people and animals and integrating canine serological data with human surveillance can improve geographic risk assessment and reduce reporting bias. Oklahoma offers a useful case in point: several TBDs are endemic, the state contains significant vulnerable populations, and public health records date to 1928, providing a longitudinal record examinable at the county level.

The COVID-19 pandemic generated a notable emotional impact on the general population, yet its effects on incarcerated individuals have been far less explored, despite the particular vulnerabilities associated with prison environments.

In the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, men who have sex with men (MSM) have become a high-risk group for HIV transmission due to their complex, secretive sexual relationships, posing challenges to HIV-1 prevention.

Testing arriving international travelers for COVID-19 paired with whole-genome sequencing (WGS) may identify new introductions of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern in California, enabling a timely public health response. Traveler genomic surveillance may be a way to improve gaps in worldwide disease genomic surveillance.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed substantial disparities in health outcomes across US communities. High-resolution mobility data offer new opportunities for real-time surveillance of behavioral responses, yet less is known about how precautionary behavior varied within cities and how these differences were associated with subsequent COVID-19 hospitalization risk.