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Introduction: Despite a decline in unintended teenage pregnancy in Australia, rates remain higher amongst justice-involved adolescent girls, who are more likely to be from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds, have histories of abuse, substance use and/or mental health issues. Furthermore, exposure to the criminal justice system may alter access to education and employment and opportunities, potentially resulting in distinct risk-factor profiles. We examine factors associated with unintended pregnancy, non-contraceptive use and Long-Acting Reversible Contraception (LARC) in a sample of sexually active, justice-involved adolescent girls from Western Australia and Queensland. Methods: Data from the Mental Health, Sexual Health and Reproductive Health of Young People in Contact with the Criminal Justice System (MeH-JOSH) Study was analysed on 118 sexually active adolescent girls. Participants were aged between 14 and 17 years, purposefully sampled based on justice-system involvement and completed an anonymous telephone survey. We constructed two multivariate models taking reproductive outcomes as the dependent variables. Results: Over one quarter (26%, 30/118) reported a past unintended pregnancy, 54 did not use any contraception at their last sexual encounter, and 17 reported LARC use. Following adjustments in the multivariate analysis, lifetime ecstasy use was associated with both unintended pregnancy (aOR 3.795, p = 0.022) and non-contraception use (aOR 4.562, p = 0.004). A history of physical abuse was also associated with both any contraception (aOR 3.024, p = 0.041) and LARC use (aOR 4.892, p = 0.050). Identifying as Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander, education/employment status and geographic location appeared to have no association. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that justice-involved adolescent girls have distinct risk factors associated with unplanned pregnancy and contraception use compared to the general population, but more research is required to understand the mechanisms and contexts underlying these risk factors. How exposure to physical violence may encourage contraception and LARC use, in particular, warrants further attention as does the association with ecstasy use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: It is unclear what factors are associated with sexually transmissible infections (STI) and HIV testing and diagnosis among justice-involved adolescents, and if these differ for Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples. Methods: A cross-sectional survey of 465 justice-involved adolescents (aged 14–17 years) from Australia was conducted between 2016 and 2018. Participants were asked about sexual behaviours, STI/HIV knowledge, and prior STI diagnoses and testing. Results: Approximately 38% (n = 130) of those sexually active had ever been screened for STI/HIV and 17.8% (n = 23) had been diagnosed with an STI. No participant reported living with HIV. For Aboriginal participants, being male (aOR 3.6, 95% CI 1.3–10.1) and having under three sexual partners in the past 12 months (aOR 3.1, 95% CI 1.2–8.0) was associated with never having had an STI/HIV test. For non-Aboriginal participants, being male (aOR 2.7, 95%CI 1.2–5.7), single (aOR 2.4, 95% CI 1.2–4.9), attending school (aOR 2.4, 95% CI 1.1–5.1), not having sought sexual health information (aOR 2.8, 95% CI 1.4–5.8), and having a lower STI/HIV knowledge score (aOR 2.3, 95% CI 1.1–5.0) were associated with never having had an STI/HIV test. Factors associated with STI diagnosis were non-heterosexual sexual orientation (aOR 5.6, 95% CI 1.1–28.2), transactional sex (aOR 11.2, 95% CI 3.0–41.3), and having sought sexual health information (aOR 3.5, 95% CI 1.0–12.5). Conclusions: Males, particularly Aboriginal male adolescents, should be engaged with sexual health promotion and testing services as soon as they come into contact with the justice system. Approaches should consider different cultural, gender and sexual orientations. This paper reports on the sexual behaviours of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal adolescents who have come into contact with the Australian justice system and looks at factors associated with testing for sexually transmissible infections (STI) and HIV, and diagnosis of sexually transmissible infections. Findings suggest there are different factors associated with STI/HIV testing for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal justice-involved adolescents. Sexual health education should start early and consider gender, cultural and sexual orientation differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When an influenza pandemic emerges, temporary school closures and antiviral treat- ment may slow virus spread, reduce the overall disease burden, and provide time for vaccine development, distribution, and administration while keeping a larger portion of the general population infection free. The impact of such measures will depend on the transmissibility and severity of the virus and the timing and extent of their imple- mentation. To provide robust assessments of layered pandemic intervention strategies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded a network of academic groups to build a framework for the development and comparison of multiple pandemic influenza models. Research teams from Columbia University, Imperial College London/ Princeton University, Northeastern University, the University of Texas at Austin/Yale University, and the University of Virginia independently modeled three prescribed sets of pandemic influenza scenarios developed collaboratively by the CDC and network members. Results provided by the groups were aggregated into a mean-based ensemble. The ensemble and most component models agreed on the ranking of the most and least effective intervention strategies by impact but not on the magnitude of those impacts. In the scenarios evaluated, vaccination alone, due to the time needed for development, approval, and deployment, would not be expected to substantially reduce the numbers of illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths that would occur. Only strategies that included early implementation of school closure were found to substantially mitigate early spread and allow time for vaccines to be developed and administered, especially under a highly transmissible pandemic scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an integrated, data-driven operational pipeline based on national agent-based models to support federal and state-level pandemic planning and response. The pipeline consists of (i) an automatic semantic-aware scheduling method that coordinates jobs across two separate high performance computing systems; (ii) a data pipeline to collect, integrate and organize national and county-level disaggregated data for initialization and post-simulation analysis; (iii) a digital twin of national social contact networks made up of 288 Million individuals and 12.6 Billion time-varying interactions covering the US states and DC; (iv) an extension of a parallel agent-based simulation model to study epidemic dynamics and associated interventions. This pipeline can run 400 replicates of national runs in less than 33 h, and reduces the need for human intervention, resulting in faster turnaround times and higher reliability and accuracy of the results. Scientifically, the work has led to significant advances in real-time epidemic sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonfatal strangulation (NFS) is a common form of domestic violence (DV) that frequently leaves no visible signs of injury and can be a portent for future fatality. A validated text mining approach was used to analyze a police dataset of 182,949 DV events for the presence of NFS. Results confirmed NFS within intimate partner relationships is a gendered form of violence. The presence of injury and/or other (non-NFS) forms of physical abuse, emotional/verbal/social abuse, and the perpetrator threatening to kill the victim, were associated with significantly higher odds of NFS perpetration. Police data contain rich information that can be accessed using automated methodologies such as text mining to add to our understanding of this pressing public health issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]