The findings are assisting in global health improvements, including surveillance science, diagnostic technologies, understanding of viral evolution, and ecological driver identification.
Close evaluation of Bénet and colleagues' study helps illuminate current weaknesses in VAP surveillance science that are beginning to be addressed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
See related research by Bénet et al., http://ccforum.com/content/16/4/R161 The report by Bénet and colleagues in the previous issue of Critical Care is at once a welcome reminder of the pivotal importance of infection surveillance programs and a window into current weaknesses in surveillance science that threaten the credibility and utility of infection control programs [ 1].
The second, A Speculative Literature for a Data-Driven Societhe examines the genealogy of our imaginations about data, innovation and surveillance — from science fiction of the early twentieth century to experimental prototypes of "big" data in the present day.
As Michah Yongo points out, just as the language used in Orwell's 1984 has been used to frame the debate around increasing government surveillance, black science fiction can provide a new language to address the increasingly complicated frameworks of discrimination.
Vital partnerships with those countries have greatly improved disease surveillance, laboratory science, emergency operations, and the capacity of the local doctors, nurses, and other public health specialists.
The Global Disease Detection GDDD) Program builds on CDC's experience in public health surveillance, laboratory science, and outbreak prevention and control (4).
"If practiced routinely, we would be subjecting hundreds of thousands of innocent people who happen to be relatives of individuals in the FBI database to lifelong genetic surveillance," Tania Simoncelli, science adviser to the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Post at the time.
Technologies like this, combined with CCTV, face-recognition software, email and phone surveillance, microbugs, forensic science, the monitoring of financial transactions and the pooling of government databases, ensure that governments now have the means, if they choose to deploy them, of following almost every move we make, every word we utter.
But while Greening the Alliance explores this surprising coevolution of environmental monitoring and surveillance, tales of science advisers issuing instructions to bomb oil spills with napalm or Dr. Strangelove-like experts eager to divert the path of hurricanes with atomic weapons make it clear: the coexistence of these forces has not always been harmonious.
This is a governance issue that will benefit from further analysis within more comprehensive programmes of workforce science, surveillance and strategic intelligence.
