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Objectives Hepatitis C virus (HCV) and HIV transmission in the United States may increase as a result of increasing rates of opioid use disorder (OUD) and associated injection drug use (IDU). Epidemiologic trends among American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) persons are not well known.Methods We analyzed 2010-2014 Indian Health Service data on health care encounters to assess regional and temporal trends in IDU indicators among adults aged ≥18 years. IDU indicators included acute or chronic HCV infection (only among adults aged 18-35 years), arm cellulitis and abscess, OUD, and opioid-related overdose. We calculated rates per 10 000 AI/AN adults for each IDU indicator overall and stratified by sex, age group, and region and evaluated rate ratios and trends by using Poisson regression analysis.Results Rates of HCV infection among adults aged 18-35 increased 9.4% per year, and rates of OUD among all adults increased 13.3% per year from 2010 to 2014. The rate of HCV infection among young women was approximately 1.3 times that among young men. Rates of opioid-related overdose among adults aged <50 years were approximately 1.4 times the rates among adults aged ≥50 years. Among young adults with HCV infection, 25.6% had concurrent OUD. Among all adults with arm cellulitis and abscess, 5.6% had concurrent OUD.Conclusions Rates of HCV infection and OUD increased significantly in the AI/AN population. Strengthened public health efforts could ensure that AI/AN communities can address increasing needs for culturally appropriate interventions, including comprehensive syringe services programs, medication-assisted treatment, and opioid-related overdose prevention and can meet the growing need for treatment of HCV infection.

In 2009, the CDC National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention (NCHHSTP) initiated the online, interactive NCHHSTP Atlas. The goal of the Atlas is to strengthen the capacity to monitor the diseases overseen by NCHHSTP and to illustrate demographic, spatial, and temporal variation in disease patterns. The Atlas includes HIV, AIDS, viral hepatitis, sexually transmitted disease, and tuberculosis surveillance data, and aims to provide a single point of access to meet the analytical and data dissemination needs of NCHHSTP. To accomplish this goal, an NCHHSTP-wide Data Harmonization Workgroup reviewed surveillance data collected by each division to harmonize the data across diseases, allowing one to query data and generate comparable maps and tables via the same user interface. Although we were not able to harmonize all data elements, data standardization is necessary and work continues toward that goal.

Field studies in support of the Winter Icing and Storms Project (WISP) were conducted in the Colorado Front Range area from 1 February to 31 March 1990 (WISP90) and from 15 January to 5 April 1991 (WISP91). The main goals of the project are to study the processes leading to the formation and depletion of supercooled liquid water in winter storms and to improve forecasts of aircraft icing. During the two field seasons, 2 research aircraft, 4 Doppler radars, 49 Mesonet stations, 7 CLASS sounding systems, 3 microwave radiometers, and a number of other facilities were deployed in the Front Range area. A comprehensive dataset was obtained on 8 anticyclonic storms, 16 cyclonic storms, and 9 frontal passages.This paper describes the objectives of the experiment, the facilities employed, the goals and results of a forecasting exercise, and applied research aspects of WISP. Research highlights are presented for several studies under way to illustrate the types of analysis being pursued. The examples chosen include topics on anticyclonic upslope storms, heavy snowfall, large droplets, shallow cold fronts, ice crystal formation and evolution, and numerical model performance.