Projects
Alan Zelicoff, MD has recently completed work on a disease prediction neural network model. His initial work has been done on Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever. Using ten years of data from Thailand the program achieved a predictive value of zxcvb. He is now refining this program and will be expanding it to cover other communicable diseases of public health significance. If you have an interest in this work please contact Professor Zelicoff at zalan@qwest.com.
Dr. R Schwartz has just finished a white paper that explores the issue of Pandemic Influenza Preparedness in Prison and Jail Populations. You can obtain a copy of this by contacting her at rschwar7@slu.edu.
Faculty activities of note:
Institute Director Dr. Gregory Evans will be in China twice this year, first in June to expand on his initial work on SARS to include Avian Infulenza that he and Dr. J Schwartz began a year ago. He will return to China in October as a participant at the Beijing Forum at Peking University.
Professor Evans has made numerous presentations on business preparedness for pandemic to several regional audiences,
Professor Stanhope has been in New Mexico, Washington DC, and will be at the FEMA Higher Education conference in Emmittsburg, MD with his “The Tale of Two Cities” presentation that contrasts the public health behaviors in Philadelphia and Saint Louis that resulted in such widely divergent rates of excess mortality during the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic.
Professors Rebmann and Stanhope will be presenting and running a pandemic influenza table top at the 2006 Summit on Pandemic disease and Avian Influenza in Arlington in July.
Professor Rebmann has made numerous presentations to nursing, infection control, and public health groups/agencies at national conferences on infectious disease emergency planning and avian influenza. Over the next few months, Dr. Rebmann will be giving presentations on infectious disease emergency planning and avian influenza at the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses Annual Conference, the National Summit on Pandemic Disease and Avian Influence, the New Jersey Home Care Association, and a regional Occupational Health Conference.
Dr. Rebmann is also currently involved in four research studies. She and a group of co-investigators from across the U.S. recently completed a secondary data analysis of hospital preparedness data obtained from a nation-wide sample of U.S. hospitals. A draft manuscript summarizing the findings from this study has been submitted for publication to a peer-reviewed journal.
Dr. Rebmann is also involved in a study to examine nurses’ bioterrorism preparedness, a project that is funded by an American Nurses Association grant. This study involves mailing a survey to a large sample of Missouri nurses to measure their bioterrorism preparedness and knowledge. She is also involved in a time-motion study comparing autoinjectors to traditional needle and syringe administration of Organophosphate antidote. The data for this study has been gathered and is currently being analyzed. Her final research project involves the conduct of a series of focus groups with infection control professionals (ICP) who participated in a disaster response. The goals of the focus groups are to elicit the ICPs’ opinions regarding what information/resources were lacking during disaster response and future education that ICPs need related to disaster preparedness. These focus groups were conducted at the 2006 Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) national conference in Tampa, FL in June.