• Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics
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• v.54 no.12
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• pp.489-500
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• 2011

Compared to the past decades, in recent decades, environmental and hygienic conditions in the Republic of Korea have improved along with socioeconomic developments, and the incidence of most infectious diseases, especially vaccine-preventable diseases, has greatly decreased due to active immunization with the developed level of health care. However, the incidence of some diseases has been increasing, and new diseases have been emerging. To cope with such changes actively, the government put the "Law for Control and Prevention of Infectious Diseases" into effect; this law was entirely revised on December 30, 2010. In this report, I review the past and recent status of infectious diseases in the Republic of Korea, following the introduction of this law, on the basis of data in the "National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System", which had been accumulated between the years 1960 and 2010.

• BMB Reports
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• v.48 no.2
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• pp.61-67
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• 2015

Norovirus is a major cause of viral gastroenteritis and a common cause of foodborne and waterborne outbreaks. Norovirus outbreaks are responsible for economic losses, most notably to the public health and food industry field. Norovirus has characteristics such as low infectious dose, prolonged shedding period, strong stability, great diversity, and frequent genome mutations. Besides these characteristics, they are known for rapid and extensive spread in closed settings such as hospitals, hotels, and schools. Norovirus is well known as a major agent of food-poisoning in diverse settings in South Korea. For these reasons, nationwide surveillance for norovirus is active in both clinical and environmental settings in South Korea. Recent studies have reported the emergence of variants and novel recombinants of norovirus. In this review, we summarized studies on the molecular epidemiology and nationwide surveillance of norovirus in South Korea. This review will provide information for vaccine development and prediction of new emerging variants of norovirus in South Korea.

• Korean Journal of Clinical Laboratory Science
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• v.50 no.3
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• pp.359-369
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• 2018

An essential measure to prevent healthcare-associated infections (HAI) is to develop a consistent system of surveillance, thereby promoting a reliable situation diagnosis to perform efficient control for the problem. Patient-to-patient transmission of pathogens within the hospital plays a substantial role in the epidemiology of HAIs. Contamination of healthcare environments commonly occurs, including facilities surfaces (e.g., bed rails, bedside tables), drinking water, cooling tower water, endoscopic instruments, food, airborne, endotoxin test, sterile test and medical equipment, with pathogenic organisms. In addition, epidemiological analysis is performed by multi locus sequence tying, pulsed-field gel electrophoresis for active surveillance. Therefore, an environmental surveillance culture test for prevention improves patient safety and blocks infection agents. Effective infection control and increased safety are possible by controlling the national infection control system. In conclusion, this study contributes to an effective infection control system through the standardization of active surveillance culture laboratory and secure expertise as infection control specialist. The primary objective of the standardization is to improve the safety of the nation's healthcare system by reducing the rates of HAIs.

• Proceedings of the Korea Society of Environmental Toocicology Conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.96-97
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• 2006

• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.50 no.5
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• pp.401-414
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• 2017

To prevent the damages from earthquakes, various researches have been conducted around the world focusing on earthquake prediction and forecasting for several decades. Among various precursory phenomena, changes in groundwater level and quality are considered to be reliable for estimating the time of earthquake occurrence and its magnitude. In effects, some countries impacted by frequent earthquakes have established and operated the groundwater monitoring network for earthquake surveillance and prediction. In Korea, recently researches have begun for using groundwater monitoring techniques for earthquake prediction. In this paper, the groundwater monitoring networks of China, Japan, and the United States were reviewed focusing on the facilities and results of researches to deduce the tasks for earthquake prediction researches using groundwater monitoring techniques in Korea. In results, research needs are suggested in the implementation of groundwater monitoring networks for specifically earthquake surveillance with the real-time monitoring and the measures to quantify the degrees of abnormal changes in the relationship of distance from the earthquake epicenter.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.403-411
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• 2010

This research demonstrates a 3D virtual visualization of urban environment and video fusion for effective damage prevention and surveillance system using open standard. We present the visualization and interaction simulation method to increase the situational awareness and optimize the realization of environmental monitoring through the CCTV video and 3D virtual environment. New camera prototype was designed based on the camera frustum view model to project recorded video prospectively onto the virtual 3D environment. The demonstration was developed by the X3D, which is royalty-free open standard and run-time architecture, and it offers abilities to represent, control and share 3D spatial information via the internet browsers.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2012.05a
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• pp.896-898
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• 2012

Recently, many countries are making efforts for the development of ocean resources because the necessity and importance of the ocean resources are increased. Underwater sensor networks have emerged as a very powerful technique for many applications, including monitoring, measurement, surveillance and control and envisioned to enable applications for oceanographic data collection, ocean sampling, environmental and pollution monitoring, offshore exploration, disaster prevention, tsunami and seaquake warning, assisted navigation, distributed tactical surveillance, and mine reconnaissance. The idea of applying sensor networks into underwater environments (i.e., forming underwater sensor networks) has received increasing interests in monitoring aquatic environments for scientific, environmental, commercial, safety, and military reasons. The data obtained by observing around the environment are wireless-transmitted by a radio set with various waves. According to the technical development of the medium set, some parameters restricted in observing the ocean have been gradually developed with the solution of power, distance, and corrosion and watertight by the seawater. The actual matters such as variety of required data, real-time observation, and data transmission, however, have not enough been improved just as various telecommunication systems on the land. In this paper, a wireless management system will be studied through a setup of wireless network available at fishery around the coast, real-time environmental observation with RF sensor, and data collection by a sensing device at the coastal areas.

• Journal of Veterinary Clinics
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.23-29
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• 2019

While research findings suggest that the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) is the leading cause of economic loss in Korean poultry industry with an estimated cumulative impact of $909 million since 2003, identifying the environmental and anthropogenic risk factors involved remains a challenge. The objective of this study was to identify areas at high risk for potential HPAI outbreaks according to the likelihood of HPAI virus detection in wild birds. This study integrates spatial information regarding HPAI surveillance with relevant demographic and environmental factors collected between 2003 and 2018. The Maximum Entropy (Maxent) species distribution modeling with presence-only data was used to model the spatial risk of HPAI virus. We used historical data on HPAI occurrence in wild birds during the period 2003-2018, collected by the National Quarantine Inspection Agency of Korea. The database contains a total of 1,065 HPAI cases (farms) tied to 168 unique locations for wild birds. Among the environmental variables, the most effective predictors of the potential distribution of HPAI in wild birds were (in order of importance) altitude, number of HPAI outbreaks at farm-level, daily amount of manure processed and number of wild birds migrated into Korea. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for the 10 Maxent replicate runs of the model with twelve variables was 0.855 with a standard deviation of 0.012 which indicates that the model performance was excellent. Results revealed that geographic area at risk of HPAI is heterogeneously distributed throughout the country with higher likelihood in the west and coastal areas. The results may help biosecurity authority to design risk-based surveillance and implementation of control interventions optimized for the areas at highest risk of HPAI outbreak potentials.

• Journal of Environmental Health Sciences
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.433-438
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• 2008

Much of the increase in agricultural productivity over the past half century has been due to the control of the pests with synthetic pesticides. The use of these pesticides has caused environmental problems and public health concern. The guidelines of maximum residue levels of pesticides in agricultural products has been well documented but more careful monitoring of their residues is required. Pyrethorid class pesticides are dominant in modern agricultural industry but public health concerns have been recently considered. The major route of pesticide exposure is the diet and with improved surveillance of pyrethorid residues in agricultural products their exposure should be controlled and minimized. In suitable products with reduced matrix effects such as agricultural products, aqueous samples, fruits and vegetables the use of immunoassays for pyrethorid residue monitoring could satisfy this requirement. Immunoassays have several advantages, namely they are highly sensitive, selective and cost-effective and enable large-scale sample handling and analysis in the laboratory.

• Atmosphere
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.153-160
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• 2010

In this paper, an attempt has been made to build and test self-configuring weather sensor networks and internet based observation system to gather atmospheric data. The aim is to provide integrated or real-time weather information in standard form using network data access protocol. This system was successfully developed to record weather information both digital as well as visual using sensor network and web-enabled surveillance cameras. These data were transformed by network based data access protocol to access and utilize for public domain. The competed system has been successfully utilized to monitor different types of weather. The results show that this is one of the most useful weather monitoring system.