Publications

anthrax in massachusetts: 1943 through 1962.		1964	14121284
case records of the massachusetts general hospital. weekly clinicopathological exercises. case 20-2002. a 37-year-old man with fever, hepatosplenomegaly, and a cutaneous foot lesion after a trip to africa.		2002	12087144
industry-related outbreak of human anthrax, massachusetts, 1868.		2002	12396936
a generalized linear mixed models approach for detecting incident clusters of disease in small areas, with an application to biological terrorism.	since the intentional dissemination of anthrax through the us postal system in the fall of 2001, there has been increased interest in surveillance for detection of biological terrorism. more generally, this could be described as the detection of incident disease clusters. in addition, the advent of affordable and quick geocoding allows for surveillance on a finer spatial scale than has been possible in the past. surveillance for incident clusters of disease in both time and space is a relatively ...	2004	14742279
the internet as a vehicle to communicate health information during a public health emergency: a survey analysis involving the anthrax scare of 2001.	the recent public health risks arising from bioterrorist threats and outbreaks of infectious diseases like sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) highlight the challenges of effectively communicating accurate health information to an alarmed public.	2004	15111274
assessing surveillance using sensitivity, specificity and timeliness.	monitoring ongoing processes of illness to detect sudden changes is an important aspect of practical epidemiology and medicine more generally. most commonly, the monitoring has been restricted to a unidimensional stream of data over time. in such situations, analytic results from the industrial process monitoring have suggested optimal approaches to monitor the data streams. data streams including spatial location as well as temporal sequence are becoming available. monitoring methods that incor ...	2006	17089948
density-equalizing euclidean minimum spanning trees for the detection of all disease cluster shapes.	existing disease cluster detection methods cannot detect clusters of all shapes and sizes or identify highly irregular sets that overestimate the true extent of the cluster. we introduce a graph-theoretical method for detecting arbitrarily shaped clusters based on the euclidean minimum spanning tree of cartogram-transformed case locations, which overcomes these shortcomings. the method is illustrated by using several clusters, including historical data sets from west nile virus and inhalational ...	2007	17519338
implementing the cities readiness initiative: lessons learned from boston.	the federally funded cities readiness initiative (cri) requires seamless federal, state, and local public health coordination to provide antibiotics to an entire city population within 48 hours of an aerosolized release of anthrax. we document practical lessons learned from the development and implementation of the boston cri plan. key themes center on heightened emphasis on security, a new mass protection model of dispensing, neighborhood-centric clinic site selection, online training of medica ...	2008	18388657
anthrax in transit; practical experience and intellectual exchange.	focusing on three anglo-american outbreaks of industrial anthrax, this essay engages the question of how local circumstances influenced the transmission of scientific knowledge in the late nineteenth century. walpole (massachusetts), glasgow, and bradford (yorkshire) served as important nodes of transnational investigation into anthrax. knowledge about the morphology and behavior of bacillus anthracis changed little while in transit between these nodes, even during complex debates about the natu ...	2008	18959192
gastrointestinal anthrax after an animal-hide drumming event - new hampshire and massachusetts, 2009.	on december 24, 2009, a woman aged 24 years from new hampshire was confirmed to have gastrointestinal anthrax on the basis of clinical findings and a bacillus anthracis blood culture isolate. her symptoms began on december 5. one day before symptom onset, she had participated in a drumming event at a community organization's building where animal-hide drums of multiple ages and origins were played. this report describes the case and subsequent investigation, which identified 84 persons potential ...	2010	20651643