Waterborne cryptosporidiosis: Adopting a mixed methods approach to inform public health decision-making
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is an investigation of the epidemiology of cryptosporidiosis in Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada. This community is the first sentinel site of Canada's integrated enteric disease surveillance system, C-EnterNet. A modified case-control design was used to determine significant risk factors for cryptosporidiosis among Waterloo Region residents between April 2005 and December 2007. A cross-sectional telephone survey was used to estimate daily water consumption patterns for Waterloo Region residents for subsequent use in quantitative microbial risk assessments. Two quantitative microbial risk assessments were developed to estimate the risk of illness from recreational water contact (in natural and treated water venues) and through treated drinking water. Finally, a qualitative study of current key informant perceptions about the adoption of risk assessment by public health and water treatment practitioners to inform decision-making at the community level was performed. The results of this thesis identify how surveillance data, in conjunction with a mixed-method approach, can be used to develop hypotheses for cryptosporidiosis source attribution, to inform public health interventions at the local level. Although based on data from one community, the findings from this study correspond with those reported in other developed countries, and serve as a model for how other Canadian communities could take advantage of existing surveillance data to inform evidence-based public health decision-making. In addition, the thesis presents a case for addressing the issues of waterborne disease in Canadian communities within an ecosystem health framework, through the development of education and communication initiatives to align public health and water treatment practitioners. Finally, it identifies the usefulness of both traditional and novel epidemiological tools to inform public health decision-making at the community level.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.162 | 0.143 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".