At the end of last year, we published our report on food poisoning outbreak of rare Bongkrekic acid (BA) that occurred in a restaurant in Taipei in March 2024, affecting 33 diners; 9 of whom were hospitalized and 6 died. @robin.n.thompson

In our recent EID letter: Serial Interval and Intervention Efficiency in Pertussis Outbreak, South Korea, 2024, we re-analyzed Cho et al.'s outbreak data to recover the unmitigated serial interval — what would be expected without case isolation. wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/... @jdushoff.bsky.social

But when Hakuho won his tournament as a Shin-Ozeki, he was Mongolian

A really nice paper with a very interestingly complicated dataset. Lots of modelling details to dig into in the SI.

Recently, Taiwanese government sent a scary book asking their citizens to prepare for war. A lot of money has been spent on that book and there QR codes in it, which would not be working in case of war. Anyway, let's wish the peace will remain

I have not been really against using AI, but first time I thought of it, when I read someone's comment on another comment published in the journal. Especially, when the opening of the letter looks "familiar": www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Indeed, checking with Grammarly gave a score of 42%

Nice preprint by David Earn and Todd Parsons (H/T @jmccaw.bsky.social) showing how the SIR model can be related to a more general class of renewal process models that don't assume exponentially distributed infectious period. arxiv.org/abs/2511.01939

Following the first report of African Swine Fever (#ASF) in Taiwan, here is a reminder of our paper on the 2018-2019 ASF outbreak in China. It took about 6 months to for ASF to get reported in every province of China. Long-distance tranmissions were driving the outbreak: doi.org/10.1017/S095...

A nice subsection, "Let us consider the following framework". My student said, it is cute

Quite interesting perspective!

My dynamical modeling slides from the NCTS course on Infectious Disease modeling github.com/dushoff/dise...

Great to have very interesting lectures during this year summer school at NTU! And great to have the summer school back after COVID-19 pandemic!

Does Copilot really help? I have been struggling with coding recently, let's see...

Oh, it's appeared - I received the first invitation to review for Discover journal. See details the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post...

This NEJM episode about angioedema is quite interesting. youtu.be/8Ds16fscqKQ?... The patient had reoccuring of abdominal pain, and it was a mystery. One of the explanations was Familial Mediterranean fever (FMF), which was unlikely because the patient didn't report any fever.

An interesting title with "China and its provinces" doi.org/10.1016/S221... Although it assumes some external provinces, they are not part of the study: all analysis is about PRC and two SARs.

Interersting and important study of Chang et al on pregnancy and associated severe injuries during the car crashes based on Taiwan data (www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...). Severe injuries: adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 1.79, 95 % CI = 1.54–2.08) and mild injuries: aOR = 8.63, 95 % CI = 8.21–9.07)

I don't understand this kind of reviews. Are people kind of not ashamed to submit just one paragraph of a summary for the review?

Recently, we published a comment on 2022 Sudan virus outbreak in Uganda www.thelancet.com/journals/lan... The study estimated the (constant) effective reproduction number Rt at 1.25. We have investigated a time-varying Rt, highlighting that its temporary variation can also provide important messages

When I received the automatic reply that the person was out of office for some time, but then they wrote "Your message will not be processed". Is it kind of a new fashion [in Europe]? :/

Oh, the news in Independent about the largest outbreak of TB in Kanzas, but the article states that TB has two different strains: active TB and latent TB. But they are definitely not two strains, and latent TB may progress to active TB... :/ www.the-independent.com/news/world/a...

新年快樂！🎉

Wow, so the cumulative excess mortality due to COVID-19 is at highest in Russia, Belarus, and Balkan republics as of July 2024 according to Cowling and Wong (doi.org/10.1007/978-...)

Another example when Taiwan with its 23-million population is simply excluded from the statistical data

In our recent paper, we showed that the incubation period of mpox infections for the 2022 global outbreak and historical data were quite close to each other (8.1 vs. 8.2 days). However, the incubation period for clade I was relatively shorter than for clade II (7.3 vs 8.9 days).

Today I was told that patients with advanced liver cancer would never be cancer-free, so their only one solution is to control the tumor.

My first post in ProMED :)

It's of great pleasure to be a part of joint effort on trying to clarify some challenging aspects for estimating epi time intervals of infectious diseases. The project mostly led and mostly realized by Sang Woo Park and Sam Abbott (@seabbs.bsky.social) - many thanks!

Interesting, a study from HK: "We calculated percentages of asymptomatic cases of 41.8% among reported SARS-CoV-2 infections and 72.1% (95% CrI 70.8%–73.0%) among total (reported and unreported) infections."