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Over the past ten years, there has been a steady increase in the reported rates of gonorrhea and chlamydia in Canada, with gonorrhea rising by 171% and chlamydia by 26%. To collect and synthesize national and international chlamydia and gonorrhea screening guidelines to inform the revision of the current Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) recommendations. A scan of published chlamydia and gonorrhea screening guidelines of high-income countries was conducted. Guidelines were appraised using the Appraisal of Guidelines for Research & Evaluation II (AGREE II) and PROGRESS-Plus tools. A total of 17 guidelines on chlamydia and gonorrhea screening published between 2015 and 2023 were included in this review. The overall score of the AGREE II methodological assessment ranged from a rating of three to seven out of seven points. Only one guideline fully met the considerations identified in the assessment tool. Most international organizations recommend universal screening for chlamydia, and a few organizations recommend opportunistic screening and targeted/risk-based screening. As for gonorrhea screening, organizations mostly recommend targeted/risk-based screening and a few organizations recommend universal screening. None of the international gonorrhea guidelines recommended opportunistic screening. The implementation of universal screening has been shown to have minimal negative impact on the individuals being screened, while increasing testing rates. Most guidelines recommend screening individuals <25 years of age, while only two organizations recommend screening individuals <30 years of age. The findings of this review will be used to inform the revision of the current PHAC recommendations on chlamydia and gonorrhea screening, which will be published in early 2025. International organizations recommend either universal or opportunistic screening. The majority of Canadian provinces and territories follow PHAC's and recommend universal screening for individuals <25 years of age.

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic served as a compelling modern-day reminder of the value of early warning against communicable disease threats in public health. As countries exit the acute phase of the pandemic, there remains a continued need to be vigilant for potential communicable disease threats, particularly as the risk of animal-to-human spillover events is increasing due to climate and land use change. Early warning of emerging threats facilitates earlier public health response, which affords more time to implement public health measures that can help minimize the impact of a particular health threat and protect the health and well-being of the population. One approach to providing early warning for communicable disease and other threats is through event-based surveillance (EBS). However, EBS is not often discussed in the context of public health surveillance. This overview introduces EBS and how it might contribute to providing early warning for communicable disease threats.

In recent years, NATO has undertaken substantial political and military adaptation to ensure the Alliance remains strong and continues to enable the collective defense and security of Allies in a more complex and volatile security environment. The 2023 Vilnius summit represented an important milestone in NATO’s adaptation process. Allies took concrete decisions to further enhance NATO’s deterrence and defense posture, step up support to Ukraine as it exercises its right to self-defense against Russian aggression, and continue investing in partnerships to tackle the challenges of a more contested and competitive world. Taken together, these decisions ensure NATO will continue to perform its essential role as the foundation of Allies’ freedom and security, the organizing framework for the collective defense of Allies and the essential forum for the transatlantic community to come together, consult, coordinate and act on all matters that affect our security.

‘During an interview with Russia Today, 85-year-old Vladimir Putin grinned while looking back on his success of restoring the empire of Tsar Peter the Great. This success started with his special military operation in Ukraine in 2022. After the Turkish and Hungarian Parliaments blocked the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO membership, the road was open to invade these two traitors to Russia. Though NATO members declared that they would individually assist Finland and Sweden, they were not yet protected by NATO’s article 5, just as Ukraine had not been. After Russia had successfully occupied Finland and Sweden, and after that the Baltic States, and cut off Europe from any gas supplies, Europe ended in an economic crisis, fragmentation, and finally disintegration. Today Europe has become a museum for Chinese tourists, under the protectorate of China, which simultaneously deals with millions of Europeans who are fleeing their homes’.

The Joint Support and Enabling Command (JSEC) was created a little more than three years ago after NATO Defense Ministers approved the establishment of JSEC and its sister headquarters Joint Force Command Norfolk (JCF NF). JSEC was set up in response to the deteriorating security situation in Europe, after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and terrorist attacks in Europe. Following the decision of the Defense Ministers in February 2018, a small international group started its work in UIm, Germany. The staff has continued to expand and the international headquarters now comprises more than 280 people with the goal to increase to 400. Its concept is unique and no comparable command existed during the Cold War.

Our world is increasingly interconnected. With the latest news at our fingertips, one of today’s challenges is to filter through the surplus of available (dis)information. While in many ways a force for good, increased interconnectedness has also led to increased co-dependencies. This was perhaps felt best when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted global supply chains. It may at times feel as if we are in a state of flux. In a changing security environment, European nations have to tackle a plethora of threats, and the lines between military offensives, daily cyberattacks or malevolent information campaigns are increasingly blurred. In Europe, a continent where economic integration has reached unprecedented levels and with a clear emphasis on open and democratic societies, these threats are leading EU Member States and NATO Allies alike to address a number of key defense aspects which have been neglected for decades. However, the way European societies are organized today is quite different from the Cold War days. Adapting to this security environment requires an innovative whole-of-government and even whole-of-society approach. One crucial concept that is proving its worth as an accelerator for this is military mobility.

Since the end of the Cold War, NATO’s available military capabilities have been reduced enormously. Allies currently maintain only a limited ready forward presence on the flanks of NATO. In addition to national forces, four battalion-size units are deployed in the Baltic States and Poland on a rotational basis. They constitute NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence, with the objective of raising the costs and risks of a potential military incursion into Allied territory. The limited number of troops stationed on NATO’s flanks significantly increased the importance of the ability to rapidly reinforce troops across the Supreme Allied Commander Europe’s Area of Responsibility (SACEUR‘s AOR). As such, readiness and capability to reinforce forces have become an essential element of deterrence and defense.

There is a tendency in academic and military discussions on NATO enablement to focus primarily on the European continent. Not to undermine important efforts underway regarding military mobility within Europe, but for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, successful enablement needs a broader geographic scope. A secure transatlantic bridge is a foundational element in the enablement of NATO’s strengthened deterrence and defense posture. This is not just the case in practical terms, such as through reinforcement and resupply in a protracted conflict, but also in symbolic terms, as the state of the North Atlantic can tell us a lot about the transatlantic relationship and the strength of the Alliance.

Evidence-informed decision making is based on the premise that the entirety of information on a topic is collected and analyzed. Systematic reviews allow for data from different studies to be rigorously assessed according to PICO principles (population, intervention, control, outcomes). However, conducting a systematic review is generally a slow process that is a significant drain on resources. The fundamental problem is that the current approach to creating a systematic review cannot scale to meet the challenges resulting from the massive body of unstructured evidence. For this reason, the Public Health Agency of Canada has been examining the automation of different stages of evidence synthesis to increase efficiencies. In this article, we present an overview of an initial version of a novel machine learning–based system that is powered by recent advances in natural language processing (NLP), such as BioBERT, with further optimizations completed using a new immunization-specific document database. The resulting optimized NLP model at the core of this system is able to identify and extract PICO-related fields from publications on immunization with an average accuracy of 88% across five classes of text. Functionality is provided through a straightforward web interface.