An outbreak of dengue fever has occured in French Guiana since the end of November 2005 until July 2006. The dengue serotype circulating was DEN-2, responsible of more than 2 000 confirmed cases and 4 deaths. The previous surveillance system was only based on the laboratories data, and didn’t permit to assess the real situation of dengue infection within the population of French Guiana. Actually, the dengue fever being a viral infection for which no etiological treatments nor immunization were available, a lot of general practioners didn’t send their patients to laboratories but prescribed only a symptomatic treatment. A survey made on the field during February 2006 in a town of 5000 inhabitants in the West of French Guiana showed that the real situation within the population was really more important than the one evaluated by the current surveillance system (135 suspected cases for only 13 confirmed cases reported by the network of laboratories). For that reason, it was decided to put in place a syndromic surveillance system, which can permit to have a better knowledge of the situation for dengue fever. The objectives of this new system were i) to detect earlier the beginning of an outbreak ii) to have a better estimation of the impact of the outbreak within the population and iii) to permit the evaluation of the Public Health strategy set up.
Objective
This paper describes a new syndromic surveillance system installed in French Guiana in April 2006 during an outbreak of dengue fever.