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Imported, minimally processed food products have been historically associated with several hepatitis A outbreaks in Australia. Here, we report the first known hepatitis A outbreak in Australia linked to consumption of imported fresh Medjool dates. Between June and September 2021, six genetically identical hepatitis A cases were notified in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory. All cases reported date consumption during their exposure period. The implicated dates were positive for hepatitis A virus (HAV) by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction. Rapid detection of this outbreak and the swift implementation of control measures was facilitated by two key factors. Firstly, Australian international border closures implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic meant that a common locally-acquired, as opposed to travel-acquired, source for cases was strongly suspected. Secondly, prompt awareness of a hepatitis A outbreak in the United Kingdom (which was found to be associated with date consumption) allowed for early hypothesis generation and investigation. This paper details the epidemiological and microbiological factors involved in this outbreak investigation and the actions taken to mitigate public health risk.

Objective Real-time surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOC) is of essential public health importance. Rapid Antigen Detection Tests (RAgDT) have become first-line COVID-19 diagnostic methods in many regions, but this strategy can hamper the surveillance of the virus variants due to their decentralized performance. The aim of this study was to assess the usefulness of the remaining sample of a widely used RAgDT (Panbio) for the surveillance of the B.1.1.7 VOC using molecular methods. Methods Symptomatic individuals and asymptomatic close contacts of confirmed cases were routinely screened for SARS-CoV-2 infection using the RAgDT in Primary Health Care Centers. After performing the test, the extraction tubes containing the remaining biological material of RAgDT-positive cases were sent to the clinical microbiology laboratory where RT-PCRs detecting key mutations of the VOC were conducted. Results A valid result was obtained in 1770/1812 (97.7%) RAgDT-positive cases. Variant B.1.1.7 was detected in 34.7% of the patients, increasing from 0% to 87.7% between the weeks beginning January 4 and March 15, 2021. Conclusion The sample remaining after performing the Panbio RAgDT allowed to monitor the emergence and circulation of the B.1.1.7, greatly improving the population screened for the molecular study of SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Introduction Bartonella henselae causes cat scratch disease (CSD), spread by a cat scratch or bite. Cats are its main reservoir. This sometimes results in optic neuritis or neuroretinitis. Objective To review these conditions in Gipuzkoa (Spain), 2014−2019. Methods A retrospective review of serology registries and clinical registries, selecting those with consistent clinical signs, contact with cats and positive serology for B. henselae (IgG-IFA ≥1/256). Results Sixty-four patients had CSD. Of these, one had optic neuritis and 3 had neuroretinitis (4/64; 6.3%). In 3 patients, flu-like symptoms preceded eye symptoms. Two suffered from loss of visual acuity at discharge, despite prolonged treatment with antibiotics and corticosteroids. Conclusion Optic neuritis and neuroretinitis caused by B. henselae are severe complications with a non-negligible incidence among patients with CSD in Gipuzkoa. We recommend ruling out CSD in patients with symptoms of optic neuritis or neuroretinitis (sudden vision loss, etc.) and contact with cats.

Resumen Introduccion Bartonella henselae causa la enfermedad por aranazo de gato (EAG), transmitida por aranazo o mordedura de gato, su principal reservorio. En ocasiones produce neuritis optica o neurorretinitis. Objetivo Revisar estas dolencias en Gipuzkoa (Espana), 2014-2019. Metodos Revision retrospectiva de registros serologicos y clinicos, seleccionando aquellos con manifestaciones clinicas compatibles, contacto con gatos y serologia positiva para B. henselae (IFI-IgG ≥ 1/256). Resultados Sesenta y cuatro pacientes presentaron EAG; entre estos, uno tenia neuritis optica y 3, neurorretinitis (4/64, 6,3%). En 3 casos un cuadro pseudogripal precedio a los sintomas oculares; 2 presentaron perdida de agudeza visual al alta, a pesar del tratamiento prolongado con antibioticos y corticoides. Conclusion La neuritis optica y la neurorretinitis por B. henselae son complicaciones graves que presentan una incidencia no despreciable entre los pacientes con EAG de Gipuzkoa. Recomendamos descartar la EAG en pacientes con sintomas de neuritis optica o neurorretinitis (perdida brusca de vision, etc.) y contacto con gatos.

We investigated whether the difference of antigen tube 2 (TB2) minus antigen tube 1 (TB1) (TB22TB1) of the QuantiFERON-TB gold plus test, which has been postulated as a surrogate for the CD81 T-cell response, could be useful in identifying recent tuberculosis (TB) exposure. We looked at the interferon gamma (IFN-g) responses and differences in TB2 and TB1 tubes for 686 adults with QFT-plus positive test results. These results were compared among groups with high (368 TB contacts), low (229 patients with immune-mediated inflammatory diseases [IMID]), and indeterminate (89 asylum seekers or people from abroad [ASPFA]) risks of recent TB exposure. A TB2-TB1 value.0.6 IU.ml(-1) was deemed to indicate a true difference between tubes. In the whole cohort, 13.6%, 10.9%, and 11.2% of cases had a TB2>TB1 result in the contact, IMID, and ASPFA groups, respectively (P = 0.591). The adjusted odds ratios (aORs) for an association between a TB2-TB1 result of >0.6 IU.ml(-1) and risk of recent exposure versus contacts were 0.71 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.31 to 1.61) for the IMID group and 0.86 (95% CI, 0.49 to 1.52) for the ASPFA group. In TB contact subgroups, 11.4%, 15.4%, and 17.7% with close, frequent, and sporadic contact had a TB2>TB1 result (P = 0.362). The aORs versus the close subgroup were 1.29 (95% CI, 0.63 to 2.62) for the frequent subgroup and 1.55 (95% CI, 0.67 to 3.60) for the sporadic subgroup. A TB2-TB1 difference of.0.6 IU.ml(-1) was not associated with increased risk of recent TB exposure, which puts into question the clinical potential as a proxy marker for recently acquired TB infection. IMPORTANCE Contact tuberculosis tracing is essential to identify recently infected people, who therefore merit preventive treatment. However, there are no diagnostic tests that can determine whether the infection is a result of a recent exposure or not. It has been suggested that by using the QuantiFERON-TB gold plus, an interferon gamma (IFN-gamma) release assay, a difference in IFN-gamma production between the two antigen tubes (TB2 minus TB1) of.0.6 IU.ml(-1) could serve as a proxy marker for recent infection. In this large multinational study, infected individuals could not be classified according to the risk of recent exposure based on differences in IFN- g in TB1 and TB2 tubes that were higher than 0.6 IU.ml(-1). QuantiFERON-TB gold plus is not able to distinguish between recent and remotely acquired tuberculosis infection, and it should not be used for that purpose in contact tuberculosis tracing. Funding Agencies|Department of Clinical Sciences of the University of Barcelona

This work proposes a scalable, blockchain-based platform for the secure sharing of COVID-19 or other disease vaccination certificates. As an indicative use case, we simulate a large-scale deployment by considering the countries of the European Union. The proposed platform is evaluated through extensive simulations in terms of computing resource usage, network response time and bandwidth. Based on the results, the proposed scheme shows satisfactory performance across all major evaluation criteria, suggesting that it can set the pace for real implementations. Vis-\`a-vis the related work, the proposed platform is novel, especially through the prism of a large-scale, full-fledged implementation and its assessment., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 1 table

The heterogeneity of Internet of Things (IoT) systems has so far prevented the definition of adequate standards, hence making it difficult to compare meaningfully the security degree of diverse architectural choices. This task can be nonetheless achieved with formal methodologies. However, the dedicated IoT literature shows no evidence of a universal model allowing the security evaluation of any arbitrary system. Based on these considerations, we propose a new model that aims at being global and all-encompassing. Our model can be used to fairly analyse the security level of different IoT systems and compare them in a significant way. It is designed to be adaptive with realistic definitions of the adversary’s (1) actions of interacting with IoT systems; (2) capabilities of accessing the data generated by and exchanged in IoT systems with established rules; and (3) objectives of attacking IoT systems according to the four recognised security properties of confidentiality, integrity, availability and soundness. Such a design enables the straightforward characterization of new adversaries. It further helps in providing a fine-grained security evaluation of IoT systems by either accurately describing attacks against the analysed systems or formally proving their guaranteed level of security.

The coronavirus pandemic is a new reality and it severely affects the modus vivendi of the international community. In this context, governments are rushing to devise or embrace novel surveillance mechanisms and monitoring systems to fight the outbreak. The development of digital tracing apps, which among others are aimed at automatising and globalising the prompt alerting of individuals at risk in a privacy-preserving manner is a prominent example of this ongoing effort. Very promptly, a number of digital contact tracing architectures has been sprouted, followed by relevant app implementations adopted by governments worldwide. Bluetooth, and specifically its Low Energy (BLE) power-conserving variant has emerged as the most promising short-range wireless network technology to implement the contact tracing service. This work offers the first to our knowledge, full-fledged review of the most concrete contact tracing architectures proposed so far in a global scale. This endeavour does not only embrace the diverse types of architectures and systems, namely centralised, decentralised, or hybrid, but it equally addresses the client side, i.e., the apps that have been already deployed in Europe by each country. There is also a full-spectrum adversary model section, which does not only amalgamate the previous work in the topic, but also brings new insights and angles to contemplate upon., 34 pages, 3 figures

A nosocomial case of Legionella pneumophila pneumonia likely caused by a serogroup 3 strain was detected by a urinary antigen test in Spain in 2018. Although Legionella bacteria could not be isolated from respiratory samples, molecular methods implicated the sink faucet of the patient's room as the probable infection source.

BackgroundClinical trials are conducted during pregnancy to evaluate benefits and risks of medicines for mother and child. The safety of maternal treatments is a key issue for healthcare professionals and parents.ObjectiveTo analyse offspring data reported in clinical trials in pregnant women with diabetes, HIV infection or hypertension (three of the most common diseases in women of childbearing potential) and either treated prior to pregnancy for these chronic diseases or diagnosed and treated during pregnancy.MethodsPubMed and Embase (1 January 1997 to 31 December 2017) were searched for drug trials in pregnant women with diabetes, HIV infection or hypertension. Titles and abstracts were screened, followed by a full-text review of eligible articles. Inclusion criteria were interventional clinical trials in pregnant women treated with medication and full text in English. Trial characteristics, maternal and offspring data were extracted. Data were summarised by disease and study. Twelve key items were considered for the offspring.ResultsOverall, 196 articles reporting 132 clinical trials (diabetes n=55; HIV n=59; hypertension n=18) were included. Key offspring data were frequently not reported, for example, number of births (diabetes: 22/55, 40%; HIV: 14/59, 24%; hypertension: 10/18, 56%). Congenital malformations were often not reported with sufficient detail (diabetes: 40/55, 73%; HIV: 39/59, 66%; hypertension: 17/18, 94%). Similar observations were made for other key items (eg, fetal losses, neonatal deaths).ConclusionUnder-reporting of key data for the offspring was frequent in publications of clinical trials in pregnant women with diabetes, HIV infection or hypertension making the assessment of the benefit-risk ratio of treatment options during pregnancy difficult.Trial registration numberCRD42017057024.

Objectives The aim of the study was to assess the feasibility of living network meta-analysis (NMA) taking into account the pace of evidence generation across different medical areas. Study Design and Setting We performed a systematic review to identify published NMAs. For each NMA, we calculated the cumulative number of new trials. To assess the feasibility of living NMA, we considered different update frequencies (4, 6, and 12 months), then evaluated the number of new trials to be included at each update in the NMA and the workload percentage for an update relative to the initial NMA. Results We identified 77 NMAs covering 17 different medical areas; 60 (78%) had fewer than four new trials included per year, on average, and 5 (7%) had more than seven trials. With an update frequency of 4, 6, and 12 months, the median number of new trials to be included in the NMA was 0 (interquartile range, 0–1), 1 (0–2), and 2 (1–4), respectively, with mean of 4%, 5%, and 11% workload per update, respectively. Conclusion The workload associated with updating a living NMA represents about one-tenth of the initial workload; therefore, living NMA is manageable.

After several years of research on cryptographic models for privacy in RFID systems, it appears that no universally model exists yet. Experience shows that security experts usually prefer using their own ad-hoc model than the existing ones. In particular, the impossibility of the models to refine the privacy assessment of different protocols has been highlighted in several studies. The paper emphasizes the necessity to define a new model capable of comparing protocols meaningfully. It introduces an untraceability model that is operational where the previous models are not. The model aims to be easily usable to design proofs or describe attacks. This spirit led to a modular model where adversary actions (oracles), capabilities (selectors and restrictions), and goals (experiment) follow an intuitive and practical approach. This design enhances the ability to formalize new adversarial assumptions and future evolutions of the technology, and provide a finest privacy evaluation of protocols.

Cet article scrute l'evolution du cadre bâti et les relations spatiales qu'il aide a structurer, ce qui traduit la vie quotidienne des occupants selon une certaine vision du monde. Plus particulierement, il analyse l'Hospice Saint-Joseph de Beauharnois, œuvre de bienfaisance qu'ont etabli les Sœurs de la Charite de l'Hopital general de Montreal, dites Sœurs Grises, au milieu du XIXe siecle, utilisant le concept de l'habitus et les outils de la grammaire spatiale. Œuvrant a l'interieur de l'Eglise catholique canadienne et au sein de la societe, elles devaient composer avec la hierarchie patriarcale tout en faisant leur propre place dans le champ social. L'interpretation du bâtiment a differentes periodes rend visible les fortunes de l'Hospice etroitement liees a l'industrialisation de la ville et au sort de la catholicite affrontant la modernite et le liberalisme. En fait, l'histoire du bâtiment condense celui de l'etablissement, la consolidation et le declin d'un reseau d'assistance institutionnel quebecois et canadien et celui de la place qu'occupe le catholicisme dans le paysage. The article traces the development of a building and the spatial relations that it helped to structure, which shaped the daily life of its occupants according to a particular world view. More specifically, the article analyses the Hospice Saint-Joseph, located in Beauharnois. The hospice was a charitable institution established by the Sisters of Charity of Montreal General Hospital, known as the Grey Nuns. The sisters established the institution in the mid-nineteenth century based on a social concept and using the tools of space relations. The Grey Nuns were required to work both within the framework of the Canadian Catholic Church and society, and were called upon to conform to a patriarchal hierarchy, while at the same time, carving their own place within the social order. At different periods in its history, the design of the building reflected the institution's wealth (or lack thereof), which was dependent upon the city's industrialization and the Catholic Church's destiny vis-a-vis modernism and liberalism. In fact, the history of the building echoes the history of the hospice, the rise and fall of a Quebec and Canadian institutional charitable network, and the place occupied by Catholicism in the contemporary landscape.

How can design professionals preserve cultural diversity? A team of graduate students and professors at Universite Laval worked with the Innu of Uashat mak Mani-Utenam, a group of First Nations peo...

Australia has worked towards uniform food legislation since 1908. The development of an effective national food safety regulatory system for Australia was driven by a number of imperatives including: to reduce inconsistencies and inefficiencies with State and Territory legislation; to reduce the cost of food regulation on the food industry; an increase in foodborne illness; a concern that existing requirements were ineffective in reducing the growing burden of foodborne illness; and international developments linking food safety with trade. However, it was not until the end of 2000 that States and Territories formally agreed to a national food safety regulatory system. The recently introduced national food safety regulatory system consists of: nationally consistent Food Acts; mandatory standards for food safety practices and food premises and equipment; a ‘model’ standard for ‘food safety programs’ and supporting infrastructure projects to assist with its implementation. The primary objective of this new system is to reduce the incidence of foodborne illness in Australia by requiring food businesses to take responsibility for the safety of the food they handle and sell by moving towards a preventative approach to managing the food safety risks within their business. The States and Territories are now implementing this system and will be formally evaluating whether it is effective in improving the safety of food within Australia.

The rise of wireless applications based on RFID has brought up major concerns on privacy. Indeed nowadays, when such an application is deployed, informed customers yearn for guarantees that their privacy will not be threatened. One formal way to perform this task is to assess the privacy level of the RFID application with a model. However, if the chosen model does not reflect the assumptions and requirements of the analyzed application, it may misevaluate its privacy level. Therefore, selecting the most appropriate model among all the existing ones is not an easy task. This paper investigates the eight most well-known RFID privacy models and thoroughly examines their advantages and drawbacks in three steps. Firstly, five RFID authentication protocols are analyzed with these models. This discloses a main worry: although these protocols intuitively ensure different privacy levels, no model is able to accurately distinguish them. Secondly, these models are grouped according to their features (e.g., tag corruption ability). This classification reveals the most appropriate candidate model(s) to be used for a privacy analysis when one of these features is especially required. Furthermore, it points out that none of the models are comprehensive. Hence, some combinations of features may not match any model. Finally, the privacy properties of the eight models are compared in order to provide an overall view of their relations. This part highlights that no model globally outclasses the other ones. Considering the required properties of an application, the thorough study provided in this paper aims to assist system designers to choose the best suited model.

Authentication protocols are usually designed to face an adversary who is able to tamper with the channel, possibly with the prover, but rarely with the verifier. When considering large-scale RFID applications, e.g., mass transportation or ticketing, the last threat is no longer a fiction. A typical case is the loss or theft of a handheld reader. If the protocol is expected to be privacy-friendly, and run by offline readers, there is no solution currently to restore the privacy once the readers are compromised except renewing all the tags, which is definitely impractical. We introduce a privacy-friendly authentication protocol that is able to maintain the security level in case of compromised readers, but also gradually restores the privacy thanks to the mobility of the customers in the system. We provide a thorough security analysis and a precise performance evaluation of our proposal. The efficiency of our solution is also demonstrated on a real-life case: we analyze the logs of 55 offline readers used during a 3-day sport event in 2010 that involved more than 100,000 tags.

Authentication for low-cost Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) is a booming research topic. The challenge is to develop secure protocols using lightweight cryptography, yet ensuring privacy. A current trend is to design such protocols upon the Learning Parity from Noise (LPN) problem. The first who introduced this solution were Hopper and Blum in 2001. Since then, many protocols have been designed, especially the protocol of Halevi, Saxena, and Halevi (HSH) [15] that combines LPN and the tree-based key infrastructure suggested by Molnar and Wagner [24]. In this paper, we introduce a new RFID authentication protocol that is less resource consuming than HSH, relying on the same adversary model and security level, though. Afterwards, we show that, if an adversary can tamper with some tags, the privacy claimed in HSH is defeated. In other words, either tags are tamper-resistant, then we suggest a protocol more efficient than HSH, or they are not, then we suggest a significative attack against the untraceability property of HSH.

Privacy is one of the most important security concerns in radio frequency identification. The publication of hundred RFID-based authentication protocols during the last decade raised the need of designing a dedicated privacy model. An important step has been done with the model of Vaudenay that combines early models into a unified and powerful one. In particular, this model addresses the case where an adversary is able to know whether or not the protocol execution succeeded. This modelizes the fact that the adversary may get information from a side channel about the termination of the protocol, e.g., she notices that the access is granted to the RFID-tag holder. We go one step forward in this paper and stress that the adversary may also have access to a side channel that leaks the computational time of the reader. This modelizes an adversary who measures how long it takes to grant the access. Although this channel could be seen as an implementation flaw, we consider that it is always risky to require the implementation to solve what the design should deal with. This new channel enables to demonstrate that many key-reference protocols are not as privacy-friendly as they claim to be, e.g., WSRE, OSK, C2, O-FRAP, O-FRAKE,... We then introduce the TIMEFUL oracle in the model of Vaudenay, which allows to analyze the resistance of the protocols to time-based attacks as soon as the design phase. Finally, we suggest some methods that make RFID-based authentication protocols immune to such attacks.

RFID-based access control solutions for mobile environments, e.g. ticketing systems for sport events, commonly rely on readers that are not continuously connected to the back-end system. The readers must so be able to perform their tasks even in offline mode, what commonly requires the management by the readers of sensitive data. We stress in this paper the problem of compromised readers and its impact in practice. We provide a thorough review of the existing authentication protocols faced to this constraint, and extend our analysis with the privacy property. We show that none of the reviewed protocols fits the required properties in case of compromised readers. We then design a sporadically-online solution that meets our expectations in terms of both security and privacy.