Vincent Pang

Emerging infectious diseases that affects a population at-risk can be effectively contained and mitigated when we have a better understanding of risk factors that pre-dispose these susceptible sub-populations to the infectious pathogens. With a clear knowledge of the risk factors, evidence-based interventions and policies can be implemented to reduce and prevent the spread of these infectious pathogens. Moreover, the biggest burden of a clinical disease is when the infected patients developed a more severe outcomes such as death, ICU, severe organs complications. Therefore, it is hypothesized that early recognition of potential severe disease outcome, based on epidemiological, clinical and molecular risk factors can be useful predictors for early triage for hospitalization and appropriate clinical management to reduce the burden of the infectious disease.

Symptomatic cases usually only represent the tip of the ice-berg of the burden of the infectious disease outbreak. There is very limited knowledge on the risk-factors of asymptomatic cases as well as their transmission dynamics. It is hypothesized that asymptomatic cases can be the main reservoir of these infectious pathogens for transmission without being detected by clinicians. This will hence be the real challenge to stop the outbreak and more investigations should be performed to understand the risk factors as well as transmission dynamics. Knowledge, attitude and practices (KAP) of good hygiene among key players such as primary healthcare practitioner, parents, general public are equally important to unraveling the epidemiological, genetic and molecular risk factors of diarrhea and hand, foot, mouth diseases. Regular survey to assess the KAP of these stakeholders would provide us a good understanding of the rationales/ drivers of the changing trends and age-group specific risk of diarrhea and hand, foot, mouth diseases.