Epidemiology

A University of Florida research team is playing its part to stop the global HIV epidemic, applying the power of artificial intelligence to medical records.

This past spring, Shantrel Canidate, M.P.H., Ph.D., was awarded a prestigious K01 grant, a research career development award from the NIH NIDA, for her work in HIV research.

On May 3, the FDA approved a vaccine to prevent respiratory syncytial virus in older adults. Dr. Cindy Prins answers some common questions about RSV disease and the new vaccine.

For their study, the investigators, who are also members of UF’s Emerging Pathogens Institute, evaluated population normalization factors, which are used to determine the relative human fecal contribution in a sample. With this information, scientists can control for fluctuations in the population contributing to a wastewater sample throughout time while quantifying the SARS-CoV-2 wastewater concentrations.

For this core group of PHHP researchers, who are also members of UF’s Center for Environmental and Human Toxicology, Water Institute and Emerging Pathogens Institute, there is an urgent need to identify emerging contaminants in Florida’s waters, assess their impact and use that data to inform local, state and federal agencies.

New research by UF investigators on Salmonella infections in Florida highlights the influence of seasons, geography and age upon transmission patterns. The team also developed new AI-based methods for detecting outbreaks and linking cases to environmental or food sources.

New research by EPI’s Burton Singer quantifies how civil disruption and violence has unraveled Ebola control measures in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu province. His work demonstrates causative links between ongoing regional civil strife and upticks in Ebola incidence due to cycles of disrupted disease control.

Kevin Bardosh isn’t like a lot of his co-workers at the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute. Not only is he a qualitative social scientist in a sea of quantitative types, he’s also a long way from his home institution, the University of Edinburgh