Quantifying the under-reporting of uncorrelated longitudal data: the genital warts example

Estimated Covid-19 burden in Spain: ARCH underreported non-stationary time series

BACKGROUND

The problem of dealing with misreported data is very common in a wide range of contexts for different reasons. The current situation caused by the Covid-19 worldwide pandemic is a clear example, where the data provided by official sources were not always reliable due to data collection issues and to the high proportion of asymptomatic cases. In this work, a flexible framework is proposed, with the objective of quantifying the severity of misreporting in a time series and reconstructing the most likely evolution of the process.

METHODS

The performance of Bayesian Synthetic Likelihood to estimate the parameters of a model based on AutoRegressive Conditional Heteroskedastic time series capable of dealing with misreported information and to reconstruct the most likely evolution of the phenomenon is assessed through a comprehensive simulation study and illustrated by reconstructing the weekly Covid-19 incidence in each Spanish Autonomous Community.

RESULTS

Only around 51% of the Covid-19 cases in the period 2020/02/23-2022/02/27 were reported in Spain, showing relevant differences in the severity of underreporting across the regions.

CONCLUSIONS

The proposed methodology provides public health decision-makers with a valuable tool in order to improve the assessment of a disease evolution under different scenarios.

Knowing the unknown: The underestimation of monkeypox cases. Insights and implications from an integrative review of the literature

Monkeypox is an emerging zoonotic disease caused by the monkeypox virus, which is an infectious agent belonging to the genus Orthopoxvirus. Currently, commencing from the end of April 2022, an outbreak of monkeypox is ongoing, with more than 43,000 cases reported as of 23 August 2022, involving 99 countries and territories across all the six World Health Organization (WHO) regions. On 23 July 2022, the Director-General of the WHO declared monkeypox a global public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), since the outbreak represents an extraordinary, unusual, and unexpected event that poses a significant risk for international spread, requiring an immediate, coordinated international response. However, the real magnitude of the burden of disease could be masked by failures in ascertainment and under-detection. As such, underestimation affects the efficiency and reliability of surveillance and notification systems and compromises the possibility of making informed and evidence-based policy decisions in terms of the adoption and implementation of ad hoc adequate preventive measures. In this review, synthesizing 53 papers, we summarize the determinants of the underestimation of sexually transmitted diseases, in general, and, in particular, monkeypox, in terms of all their various components and dimensions (under-ascertainment, underreporting, under-detection, under-diagnosis, misdiagnosis/misclassification, and under-notification).

Maternal condyloma acuminata infection in pregnancy and offspring long-term respiratory and infectious outcome

BACKGROUND

Maternal condyloma acuminata infection may be vertically transmitted to the offspring during pregnancy and childbirth. Our study aimed to investigate the possible impact of maternal condyloma acuminata infection in pregnancy on offspring respiratory and infectious morbidity.

METHODS

A population-based cohort analysis including all singleton deliveries occurring between 1991 and 2014 at a tertiary medical center. Long-term infectious and respiratory morbidities were compared between children with and without exposure to maternal condyloma infection during pregnancy. A Kaplan-Meier survival curve was used to compare cumulative hospitalization rate and a Cox regression analyses to control for confounders.

RESULTS

No significant differences were found in total respiratory and infectious related hospitalizations between the study groups. The survival curves demonstrated no difference in the cumulative incidence between the two groups in both respiratory hospitalizations (log-rank, p = 0.18) and infectious hospitalizations (log-rank, p = 0.95). Cox multivariable analyses demonstrated that exposure to maternal condyloma infection during pregnancy is not a risk factor for neither infectious (aHR 0.91, [CI] 0.49-1.69) nor respiratory (aHR 0.37, [CI] 0.09-1.51) morbidity during childhood and adolescence.

CONCLUSION

Exposure to maternal condyloma infection during pregnancy does not appear to be an independent risk factor for later respiratory or infectious morbidity throughout childhood and adolescence.

New statistical model for misreported data with application to current public health challenges

The main goal of this work is to present a new model able to deal with potentially misreported continuous time series. The proposed model is able to handle the autocorrelation structure in continuous time series data, which might be partially or totally underreported or overreported. Its performance is illustrated through a comprehensive simulation study considering several autocorrelation structures and three real data applications on human papillomavirus incidence in Girona (Catalonia, Spain) and Covid-19 incidence in two regions with very different circumstances: the early days of the epidemic in the Chinese region of Heilongjiang and the most current data from Catalonia.