Objective
To study if syndromic surveillance would have an added value over existing surveillance systems, we retrospectively evaluated whether known trends in respiratory pathogens are reflected in medical registrations in the Netherlands when using respiratory syndrome groupings.
Objective
Understanding the baseline dynamics of syndrome counts is essential for use in prospective syndromic surveillance. Therefore we studied to what extent the known seasonal dynamics of gastro-intestinal (GI) pathogens explain the dynamics in GI syndrome in general practitioner and hospital data.
Crude mortality could be valuable for infectious disease surveillance if available in a complete and timely fashion. Syndromic surveillance with weekly deaths has been demonstrated to be useful in France. Such data can be of use for detecting, and tracking the impact, of unusual health events (e.g. pandemic influenza) or other unexpected or unknown events of infectious nature. To evaluate whether these aims can be achieved with crude mortality monitoring in the Netherlands, we investigated trends in death notifications and we tested whether retrospective crude mortality trends, at different days of delay, reflect known trends in infectious pathogens that are associated with death (such as influenza).
Objective
To evaluate the potential of mortality data in the Netherlands for real-time surveillance of infectious events.
Crude mortality could be valuable for infectious disease surveillance if available in a complete and timely fashion. Such data can be of used for detecting, and tracking the impact of unusual health events (e.g. pandemic influenza) or other unexpected or unknown events of infectious nature.
To evaluate whether these goals can be achieved with crude mortality monitoring in the Netherlands, a pilot study was set up in 2008 in which death counts were received from Statistics Netherlands.
The aims of this pilot are: 1) Setting up communication and data transmission. 2) Calculating expected mortality counts (depending on the season) and a prediction interval. 3) Detecting deviations in mortality counts above the threshold. 4) Comparing such deviations (and lags hereof) with other public health information (such as sentinel influenza-like-illness surveillance, and web-based selfreported ILI). 4) Evaluating the additional value of such a system for infectious disease public health.
Objective
To evaluate the potential use of mortality data in the Netherlands for real-time surveillance of infectious disease events through a pilot study.
To evaluate whether syndromic surveillance can detect localized outbreaks of lower-respiratory infections (LRI's) with limited numbers of alarms in time.
To evaluate whether a rise or shift in severe morbidity and mortality by influenza can be detected with syndromic surveillance.
To evaluate the added value of a syndromic surveillance system in detecting a large severe respiratory disease outbreak with a point-source we used the Legionnaires' disease (LD) outbreak of 1999 in the Netherlands as a case-study. We retrospectively simulated a prospective syndromic surveillance for space-time clusters of patients with pneumonia in hospital records to detect the LD outbreak.
Syndromic surveillance may be suited for detection of emerging respiratory disease elevations that could pass undiagnosed. The syndromes under surveillance should then retrospectively reflect known respiratory pathogen activity. To validate this for respiratory syndromes we analyzed dutch medical registration data from 1999-2003 (national hospital discharge diagnoses and causes of death). We assume that syndromes with a good reflection of pathogen activity have the potential ability to reflect unexpected respiratory pathogen activity in prospective surveillance.
Objective
As a validation for syndromic surveillance we studied whether respiratory syndromes indeed reflect the activity of respiratory pathogens. Therefore we retrospectively estimated the temporal trend of two respiratory syndromes by the seasonal dynamics of common respiratory pathogens.
To estimate diagnostic demand in case of pandemic threat using trends in respiratory syndromes (as input for a laboratory preparedness program).
Although norovirus (NoV) is the most common cause of acute gastroenteritis (ewinter vomiting diseaseÃ), its contribution to mortality remains unknown and may be an unrecognized problem [1]. In Europe a genetic shift in circulating NoV strains was observed in 2002 which coincided with an unusually high number of NoV outbreaks in all but one country participating in the European NoV-surveillance network [2]. Covering a time period which included this outbreak peak, we used general practitioner (GP), hospital, and death-cause data in combination with NoV surveillance data to explore the association between NoV outbreaks and morbidity and mortality.