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Hoek Wim

Accurately assigning causes or contributing causes to deaths remains a universal challenge, especially in the elderly with underlying disease. Cause of death statistics commonly record the underlying cause of death, and influenza deaths in winter are often attributed to underlying circulatory disorders. Estimating the number of deaths attributable to influenza is, therefore, usually performed using statistical models. These regression models (usually linear or poisson regression are applied) are flexible and can be built to incorporate trends in addition to influenza virus activity such as surveillance data on other viruses, bacteria, pure seasonal trends and temperature trends.

 

Objective

Mortality exhibits clear seasonality mainly caused by an increase in deaths in the elderly in winter. As there may be substantial hidden mortality for a number of common pathogens, we estimated the number of elderly deaths attributable to common seasonal viruses and bacteria for which robust weekly laboratory surveillance data were available.

Referenced File
Submitted by hparton on

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.

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on

Assigning causes of deaths to seasonal infectious diseases is difficult in part due to laboratory testing prior to death being uncommon. Since influenza (and other common respiratory pathogens) are therefore notoriously underreported as a (contributing) cause of death in deathcause statistics modeling studies are commonly used to estimate the impact of influenza on mortality.

Objective

To estimate mortality attributable to influenza adjusted for other common respiratory pathogens, baseline seasonal trends and extreme temperatures.

Submitted by Magou on
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