Publications by authors named "Isabelle Pontais"

Unlabelled: Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a leading cause of infant morbidity. France has implemented a national campaign using nirsevimab to prevent RSV-related infections in infants. This study assessed its effectiveness in preventing hospitalization due to bronchiolitis in emergency department (ED).

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Article Synopsis
  • Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a significant cause of hospitalizations and fatalities in infants globally, prompting France to start a national program administering nirsevimab, a monoclonal antibody treatment, to protect infants from RSV infections.
  • A modeling study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of nirsevimab and estimate the number of RSV-related hospitalizations avoided in infants under 24 months during the 2023-24 season in France.
  • The findings indicated that nirsevimab prevented approximately 5,800 RSV-associated hospitalizations for bronchiolitis in children under 24 months, with around 4,200 of these cases in infants aged 0-2 months.
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Article Synopsis
  • The European Mortality Monitoring Network (EuroMOMO) noticed more people are dying than usual since late November 2023.
  • In the early weeks of 2024, there were about 95 extra deaths for every 100,000 people in Europe, mostly affecting adults aged 45 and older.
  • This rise in deaths seems to be happening because of a lot of illnesses like COVID-19, flu, and RSV during the winter season.
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Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, French health authorities have encouraged barrier measures and implemented three lockdowns to slow SARS-CoV-2 transmission. We aimed to examine the impact of these measures on the epidemiology of acute gastroenteritis (AGE) in France, from November 2019 to August 2021. We describe trends in AGE indicators from syndromic surveillance and a sentinel surveillance network.

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Objectives: We described bronchiolitis epidemics during the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 seasons in France and their interaction with the COVID outbreak.

Patients And Methods: Data on family physician (FP) visits, emergency department (ED) visits, hospitalizations for bronchiolitis for children˂2 years, and hospital virological data were analyzed and compared with previous seasons (2015-2020).

Results: The 2020-2021 epidemic arrived very late, and its impact was lower than in previous seasons (2015-2020) (FP visits: -23%, ED visits: -38%, and hospitalizations: -30%).

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Comparing age and sex differences in SARS-CoV-2 hospitalization and mortality with MERS-CoV, seasonal coronaviruses, influenza and other health outcomes opens the way to generating hypotheses as to underlying mechanisms driving disease risk. Using 60-year-olds as a reference age group, we find that relative rates of hospitalization and mortality associated with the emergent coronaviruses are lower during childhood and start to increase earlier (around puberty) as compared with influenza and seasonal coronaviruses. The changing distribution of disease risk by age for emerging pathogens appears to broadly track the gradual deterioration of the immune system (immunosenescence), which starts around puberty.

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Background: The French syndromic surveillance (SyS) system, SurSaUD®, was one of the systems used to monitor the COVID-19 outbreak.

Aim: This study described the epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19-related visits to both emergency departments (EDs) and the network of emergency general practitioners known as SOS Médecins (SOSMed) in France from 17 February to 28 June 2020.

Methods: Data on all visits to 634 EDs and 60 SOSMed associations were collected daily.

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Antibiotic stewardship requires clear insight into antibiotic overuse and the syndromes that lead to prescription. The aim of this study was to estimate the proportion of antibiotic prescriptions attributable to acute lower respiratory tract infections (LRTIs) during the cold season. Using individual data from the French National Health Insurance (NHI) database, weekly time series were constructed of outpatient antibiotic (beta-lactams and macrolides) prescriptions between January 2010 and December 2017.

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Through a weekly all-cause mortality surveillance system, we observed in France a major all-cause excess mortality from March to May 2020, concomitant with the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) epidemic. The excess mortality was 25,030 deaths, mainly among elderly people. Five metropolitan regions were the most affected, particularly Île-de-France and the Grand-Est regions.

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Background: Maps of influenza activity are important tools to monitor influenza epidemics and inform policymakers. In France, the availability of a high-quality data set from the Oscour surveillance network, covering 92% of hospital emergency department (ED) visits, offers new opportunities for disease mapping. Traditional geostatistical mapping methods such as Kriging ignore underlying population sizes, are not suited to non-Gaussian data and do not account for uncertainty in parameter estimates.

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Fire blight is a disease affecting Maloideae caused by the necrogenic bacterium Erwinia amylovora, which requires the type III protein secretion system (TTSS) for pathogenicity. Profiles of methanol-extractable leaf phenolics of two apple (Malus x domestica) genotypes with contrasting susceptibility to this disease were analyzed by HPLC after infection. Some qualitative differences were recorded between the constitutive compositions of the two genotypes but in both of them dihydrochalcones accounted for more than 90% of total phenolics.

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