Thanks to those who were able to join us for this week's Journal Club meeting.  It was good to think about how Epidemiology helps support IPC and hear Margie take us through some of the IPC considerations in managing respiratory infections in our healthcare services.  

Also, here is a recent journal article which talks about the reasons which are contributing to the increase in pertussis infections that has been seen in many countries in the past year  Resurgence of pertussis: Epidemiological trends, contributing factors, challenges, and recommendations for vaccination and surveillance - PMC 

You may be interested to have a look at some resources to help keep track of disease alerts and news in our area and around the world

• Epidemic and emerging disease alerts in the Pacific region - Pacific Data Hub - this map shows up to date disease alerts for Pacific countries.  Clicking on the alert will open up more information about what's happening. 
• Epidemic and emerging disease alerts in the Pacific as of 16 September 2025 - World | ReliefWeb - this Relief Web site presents a weekly report based on this Pacific Data Hub information.
• Pacific Syndromic Surveillance - Pacific Public Health Surveillance Network - this site gives weekly syndromic surveillance reports for the Western Pacific region, as tracking the increases and decreases in syndromes (sets of symptoms) patients are presenting with can give early clues to the diseases that we might expect to see.  
• Disease Outbreak News - this WHO site provides information about confirmed acute public health events or potential events of concern and can be filtered for the Western Pacific region.
• WHO Western Pacific | World Health Organization - this WHO site gives health from around the region
• Our World in Data - This site allows data about health and other topics to be searched.  Some this data is up to date, but for other conditions it is a year or two old. 

As we discussed during the journal club, we look forward to seeing your photos of some of your IPC challenges, so we can look at them together next month.  You can email your photos to me or post them in the WhatsApp chat.   
Here's Margie's list of ideas of things that might be on your list of challenges:

• Overcrowded waiting room or wards 
• Waiting room with poor ventilation 
• Wards with poor ventilation. 
• Inadequate shared bathrooms. 
• Too many guardians/visitors 
• No risk assessment on guardians/visitors - do they have any respiratory symptoms or have they been vaccinated. 
• Close contacts not identified. 
• HCW vaccination status not known

Please let us know if you would like to chat about these challenges or about putting together a presentation about them for your staff.