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The prevention of infectious diseases is a global health priority area. The early detection of possible epidemics is the first and important defense line against infectious diseases. However, conventional surveillance systems, e.g., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), rely on clinical data. The CDC publishes the surveillance results weeks after epidemic outbreaks. To improve the early detection of epidemic outbreaks, we designed a syndromic surveillance system to predict the epidemic trends based on disease-related Google search volume. Specifically, we first represented the epidemic trend with multiple alert levels to reduce the noise level. Then, we predicted the epidemic alert levels using a continuous density HMM, which incorporated the intrinsic characteristic of the disease transmission for alert level estimation. Respective models are built to monitor both national and regional epidemic alert levels of the U.S. The proposed system can provide real-time surveillance results, which are weeks before the CDC’s reports. This paper focusses on monitoring the infectious disease in the U.S., however, we believe similar approach may be used to monitor epidemics for the developing countries as well. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Atrazine (ATZ) is the second most common agricultural herbicide used in the United States and is an endocrine disrupting chemical (EDC). Developmental exposure to ATZ can lead to significant behavioral and morphological alterations in exposed animals and their progeny suggesting the involvement of an epigenetic mechanism. Specific epigenetic mechanisms responsible for these alterations, however, are yet to be elucidated. In this study, we exposed zebrafish embryos to 0, 0.3, 3, or 30 ppb (μg/L) of ATZ from 1 to 72 h post fertilization (hpf). Chemical exposure was ceased and zebrafish maintained until 9 months post fertilization (mpf), when whole-genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS) was performed to assess the effects of embryonic ATZ exposure on DNA methylation in female fish brains. The number of differentially methylated genes (DMGs) increased with increasing treatment concentration. DMGs were enriched in neurological pathways with extensive methylation changes consistently observed in neuroendocrine pathways. Specifically, DMGs with methylation changes in promoter regions showed hypomethylation in estrogen receptor signaling and hypermethylation in androgen signaling. DMGs with methylation changes in genebody were primarily enriched for mitochondrion-related pathways associated with healthy aging. Integrated analysis with transcriptomic data at 9 mpf exhibited a similar trend identifying CABLES1 and NDUFA4 as shared targets at all concentrations. We then compared the predicted upstream regulators of transcriptomic changes with DMGs and identified CALML3 as a common upstream regulator at both 0.3 and 30 ppb that exhibit significant methylation changes. Collectively, our study identified long-lasting DNA methylation changes in genome after embryonic ATZ exposure and elucidated potential gene targets whose aberrant methylation features may drive alterations in gene transcription in long-term. [Display omitted] • DNA methylation in zebrafish brain is altered late-in-life after embryonic exposure to ATZ. • The number of differentially methylated genes (DMR) increases with atrazine doses. • DMRs are enriched in neuroendocrine and mitochondrial pathways at all doses. • CDK5 and oxidative phosphorylation signaling exhibit consistent methylation changes. • Epigenetic enzymes and neurogenesis genes exhibiting persistent methylation changes predict transcriptional changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]