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Health Protection

Posts about the work of the Health Protection directorate

Syndromic surveillance: our national insurance

Syndromic surveillance is an innovative way of collecting and analysing health surveillance data and is becoming an increasingly popular way of monitoring public health across the world. Syndromic surveillance complements existing programmes, which are usually based upon traditional laboratory reporting, …

A body of evidence: field epidemiology in PHE

Posted by: , Posted on: - Categories: Field epidemiology, Health Protection, Protecting the country's health

Field epidemiology is one of the mainstays of examining outbreaks of infectious disease.  Public Health England’s field epidemiology service (FES) contributes to investigating anything from the more common food poisoning incidents to the more exotic such as the new MERS-Coronavirus recently identified …

Flooding and the public's health: looking beyond the short-term

Posted by: and , Posted on: - Categories: Climate change, Health Protection, Protecting the country's health
Copyright Public Health England

In the past month, windstorms and flooding have been knocking at our doors more frequently than we would like. Like an unwelcome guest, severe weather brings with it many problems and often ones that are not always easily visible.  It …

Making HIV testing part of how we care for ourselves

Via Wikimedia Commons

HIV remains a major source of harm to people’s health, much of which is avoidable.  There are more HIV tests being performed in England than at any time in the three decades we’ve been battling this virus. That’s welcome, but …

Mistreating the treatment: the struggle against antibiotic resistance

Posted by: , Posted on: - Categories: Antimicrobial resistance, Health Protection, Protecting the country's health

Antibiotics have been around for nearly 70 years.  Many people still alive today may remember them first being used to treat casualties from the Second World War. Around 1944 a newspaper billboard proclaimed that ‘Penicillin cures gonorrhoea in four hours …

Public health in a changing climate

Posted by: , Posted on: - Categories: Climate change, Health Protection, Protecting the country's health, Sustainability

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has now published its fifth assessment report, confirming the scientific evidence that the climate is indeed changing, and that this change is even more certainly due to human activities than was previously thought. …