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General - ISDS

Join us for a follow-up webinar, to our first held last February, where the ISDS staff will present enhancements made to the ISDS website to help you improve your experience as a member. Refresh your knowledge of how to navigate through our website, participate in community discussions, and locate ISDS resources. Also learn new ways to engage with other members of the community, including building connections, following forms, and posting, linking, and sharing announcements across group pages. 



Description

The International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) will hold its fourteenth annual conference in Denver, CO on December 10th and 11th, 2015. The society's mission is to improve population health by advancing the science and practice of disease surveillance, and the annual conference advances this mission by bringing together practitioners and researchers from multiple fields involved in disease surveillance, including public health, epidemiology, health policy, biostatistics and mathematical modeling, informatics and computer science. This year the conference received 224 abstract submissions, from 20 countries. We accepted 41 abstracts for oral presentations, along with 36 lightning talks and 98 posters.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on
Description

Drug overdoses are an increasingly serious problem in the United States and worldwide. The CDC estimates that 47,055 drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States in 2014, 61% of which involved opioids (including heroin, pain relievers such as oxycodone, and synthetics).1 Overdose deaths involving opioids increased 3-fold from 2000 to 2014.1 These statistics motivate public health to identify emerging trends in overdoses, including geographic, demographic, and behavioral patterns (e.g., which combinations of drugs are involved). Early detection can inform prevention and response efforts, as well as quantifying the effects of drug legislation and other policy changes.

The fast subset scan2 detects significant spatial patterns of disease by efficiently maximizing a log-likelihood ratio statistic over subsets of data points, and has recently been extended to multidimensional data (MD-Scan).3 While MD-Scan is a potentially useful tool for drug overdose surveillance, the high dimensionality and sparsity of the data requires a new approach to estimate and represent baselines (expected counts), maintaining both accuracy and efficient computation when searching over subsets. 

Objective

We present the multidimensional tensor scan (MDTS), a new method for identifying emerging patterns in multidimensional spatio-temporal data, and demonstrate the utility of this approach for discovering emerging geographic, demographic, and behavioral trends in fatal drug overdoses. 

Submitted by Magou on
Description

On July 22, 2016, the Sand Fire began burning in the Santa Clarita Valley of Los Angeles County (LAC), CA. This urban-adjacent wildfire breached the city limits of Santa Clarita (population 180,000). Fueled by record heat and an ongoing exceptional drought, the Sand Fire burned over 40,000 acres in 13 days and caused a large increase in the air concentration of fine particulate matter. The syndromic surveillance team was tasked with reporting on possible health effects from the fire. Fire, asthma, and heat related data were monitored until the fire was reported as 98% contained. The team prepared and distributed a daily special summary report to key stakeholders in the LAC Department of Public Health. 

Objective

To detect increases in health complaints resulting from the July 2016 Sand Fire near Santa Clarita, CA using syndromic surveillance and complementary systems. 

Submitted by Magou on
Description

Most surveillance methods in the literature focus on temporal aberration detections with data aggregated to certain geographical boundaries. SaTScan has been widely used for spatiotemporal aberration detection due to its user friendly software interface. However, the software is limited to spatial scan statistics and suffers from location imprecision and heterogeneity of population. R Surveillance has a collection of spatiotemporal methods that focus more on research instead of surveillance.

 Objective

To build an open source spatiotemporal system that integrates analysis and visualization for disease surveillance. 

 

Submitted by Magou on
Description

In July 2016, 77% of ED data was transmitted daily via Health Level 7 (HL7) messages, compared to only 27% in July 2015 (Figure). During this same period, chief complaint (CC) word count has increased from an average of 3.8 words to 6.0 words, with a twenty-fold increase in the appearance of the word “denies” in the chief complaint (Figure). While HL7 messages provide robust chief complaint data, this may also introduce errors that could lead to symptom and syndrome misclassification. 

Objective

To describe the effect of symptom negation in emergency department (ED) chief complaint data received by the New York City (NYC) Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), and to devise a solution to avoid syndrome and symptom misclassification for commonly used negations using SAS Perl Regular Expression (PRX) functions. 

Submitted by Magou on
Description

An active syndromic surveillance system was designed to collect cattle health information from a sample of Texas cattle market sales. Texas Animal Health Commission livestock inspectors record the total number of animals observed along with the total number displaying clinical signs of interest grouped into body system categories (e.g. respiratory, neurologic, etc.). Inspection reports are submitted to the United States Department of Agriculture Veterinary Services (VS) Risk Identification Team for monitoring. 

Objective

Implement a mobile technology platform to capture and transmit syndromic cattle data collected at Texas market sales. 

Submitted by Magou on
Description

Influenza is a serious problem for the health of people, animals and birds. Therefore, comprehensive study of influenza virus, its natural reservoir, pathogenesis and immune response will provide further opportunity to ensure protection for animals, birds and people from this infection. 

Objective

To study the immune response in chicken on the administration of LPAIV isolated from the natural reservoir. 

Submitted by Magou on
Description

Multiple agencies are involved in global disease surveillance and coordination of activities is essential to achieve broad public health impact. Multiple examples of effective and collaborative initiatives exist. The WHO/AFRO developed Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) framework, adopted by 43 of the 46 AFRO member states and applied in other WHO regions, was the first framework designed to strengthen national disease surveillance and response systems. The WHO International Health Regulations (IHR) 2005 are an agreement between 196 countries to prevent, detect and respond to the international spread of disease. In 2013 CDC worked with Uganda and Vietnam to demonstrate the development of surveillance, laboratory, and emergency response center capacity and link data systems for six outbreak prone diseases. More recently, the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) was launched with the support of 28 countries, WHO, OIE and FAO just as Ebola was beginning to emerge in West Africa. This panel brings together CDC, local implementing partners, academic technical partners, and international non-government donor to discuss current and evolving strategies for prevention, detection, and response activities needed for global health security. 

Objective

The session will discuss strategies for outbreak prevention, detection, and response for global health security and explore how these activities inform both domestic and international initiatives. Innovations in epidemiology, laboratory, informatics, investment, and coordination for disease surveillance will be discussed. 

Submitted by Magou on