An Interview with the Ottawa Hospital’s Chief of Staff Dr. Virginia Roth

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Sen Phuong ◽  
Hao Wang
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Medical Students ◽  
Infectious Disease Physician ◽  
Chief Of Staff ◽  
Epidemic Intelligence ◽  
Executive Mba ◽  
Control And Prevention ◽  
The University ◽  
Intelligence Service ◽  
The U.S

Dr. Virginia Roth is an infectious disease physician who has been the Ottawa Hospital’s Chief of Staff since 2018 and was the first woman to hold this position at TOH. An alumnus of the University of Ottawa Faculty of Medicine, she has also worked as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and as Director of Infection Control at TOH. She also holds an Executive MBA from the Telfer School of Management. We sat down with Dr. Roth in late-September to talk more about her career path and professional roles, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and any advice for medical students as they navigate their own education and careers.  

scholarly journals Field epidemiology training in Europe faces a bright future

2001 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 33-34
Author(s):  
Arthur L. Reingold
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
50Th Anniversary ◽  
Local Public Health ◽  
Public Health Agencies ◽  
Field Epidemiology ◽  
Epidemic Intelligence ◽  
Health Agencies ◽  
Control And Prevention ◽  
Training Programmes ◽  
Intelligence Service

It is fitting that the group of articles describing various field epidemiology training programmes published here should appear in 2001, the 50th anniversary of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Were he still alive today, Alex Langmuir (founder of EIS) would be delighted to see how well established and successful such training programmes have become in Europe. Similar ‘on-the-job’ training programmes intended to provide health professionals with the practical skills needed to conduct relevant and timely applied epidemiological investigations in the ‘real world’ of public health are also burgeoning in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Some of these training programmes are being developed and offered jointly with local academic institutions, others involve formal partnerships with CDC itself, and some are stand alone efforts of local public health agencies.

scholarly journals Improving Probabilistic Infectious Disease Forecasting Through Coherence

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Casey Gibson ◽  
Kelly R. Moran ◽  
Nicholas G. Reich ◽  
Dave Osthus
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Disease Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
Weighted Sum ◽  
Public Health Burden ◽  
Control And Prevention ◽  
Centers For Disease Control ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Geographical Units

AbstractWith an estimated $10.4 billion in medical costs and 31.4 million outpatient visits each year, influenza poses a serious burden of disease in the United States. To provide insights and advance warning into the spread of influenza, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) runs a challenge for forecasting weighted influenza-like illness (wILI) at the national and regional level. Many models produce independent forecasts for each geographical unit, ignoring the constraint that the national wILI is a weighted sum of regional wILI, where the weights correspond to the population size of the region. We propose a novel algorithm that transforms a set of independent forecast distributions to obey this constraint, which we refer to as probabilistically coherent. Enforcing probabilistic coherence led to an increase in forecast skill for 90% of the models we tested over multiple flu seasons, highlighting the importance of respecting the forecasting system’s geographical hierarchy.Author SummarySeasonal influenza causes a significant public health burden nationwide. Accurate influenza forecasting may help public health officials allocate resources and plan responses to emerging outbreaks. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports influenza data at multiple geographical units, including regionally and nationally, where the national data are by construction a weighted sum of the regional data. In an effort to improve influenza forecast accuracy across all models submitted to the CDC’s annual flu forecasting challenge, we examined the effect of imposing this geographical constraint on the set of independent forecasts, made publicly available by the CDC. We developed a novel method to transform forecast densities to obey the geographical constraint that respects the correlation structure between geographical units. This method showed consistent improvement across 90% of models and that held when stratified by targets and test seasons. Our method can be applied to other forecasting systems both within and outside an infectious disease context that have a geographical hierarchy.

scholarly journals The Field Epidemiology Training Program (FETP) in Germany

2001 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 43-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
A Ammon ◽  
◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Research Capacity ◽  
Training Programme ◽  
The United States ◽  
Field Epidemiology ◽  
Epidemic Intelligence ◽  
Outbreak Investigations ◽  
Control And Prevention ◽  
Intelligence Service ◽  
Field Epidemiology Training Program ◽  
National Effort

The German Field Epidemiology Training Programme (FETP), which started in January 1996, is part of a national effort to improve research capacity for the epidemiology of infectious diseases in Germany. The aim of the two year programme is to develop a cadre of epidemiologists capable of performing outbreak investigations, epidemiological research, and surveillance at an international standard measured in articles published in international peer-reviewed journals. These epidemiologists will also be instructed to train future epidemiologists and public health personnel. The programme is similar to the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States and the European Programme for Intervention Epidemiology Training (EPIET). The German Federal Ministry for Education and Research funded the costs of a senior epidemiologist who was seconded from the CDC to help initiate this programme.

scholarly journals The Epidemic Intelligence Service in the United States

2001 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 34-36
Author(s):  
Stephen M. Ostroff
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
50Th Anniversary ◽  
Training Programme ◽  
The United States ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Epidemic Intelligence ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Control And Prevention ◽  
Intelligence Service

The Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) - the two year applied epidemiology training programme of the United States (US) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) - celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2001. Developed during the Korean war, only five years after CDC was established, the stimulus behind developing the EIS was a lack of trained field investigators should biological agents be intentionally used against the US population. It was, however, clear to Alexander Langmuir, the head of epidemiology at CDC and founder of the EIS, that his trainees would engage in a wide range of activities and help fill gaps in the US for epidemiologists with the skills and practical field experience to investigate and control naturally occurring outbreaks of diseases.

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