Surveillance Systems

Information is imperative to detecting and intervening in a disease outbreak, but the enormous amount of information that public health leaders must sift through can become overwhelming and obstructive. In the disease outbreak environment, it is imperative to understand which sources of information add value and should be used for decision making in this limited timeframe. Recent research has found that social media sources and news media sources may provide indicators of disease outbreaks prior to traditional reporting sources (i.e. surveillance systems) (1). WHO uses informal information sources for about 65% of their outbreak investigations and relies on informal sources for daily surveillance activities (2).

Objective

Share the results of a survey on knowledge and attitudes regarding digital disease detection amongst ISDS members and share the resulting framework.

The mortality monitoring system was initiated in August 2009 during the influenza A(H1N1) pandemic. It is a collaboration between the Centre for Infectious Disease Control (CIb) and Statistics Netherlands. The system monitors nation-wide reported number of deaths (population: 16.8 million) from all causes, as cause of death information is not available real-time. Data is received from Statistics Netherlands by weekly emails.

Objective

Weekly numbers of deaths are monitored to increase the capacity to deal with unusual (disease) events such as pandemic influenza, other infections and non-infectious incidents. The monitoring information can potentially be used to track and estimate the impact of an outbreak on all cause mortality.

Co-financed by the European Commission through the Executive Agency for Health and Consumers, the European Triple-S project (Syndromic Surveillance Survey, Assessment towards Guidelines for Europe) was launched in 2010 for a 3-year period [1]. It involves 24 organisations from 13 countries. The project's final purpose is to increase the European capacity for real-time surveillance and monitoring of the health burden of expected and unexpected health-related events. Based on inventories of European SyS systems [2;3], eight country visits [4] and experts advice, the project has developed scientific guidelines that aim at providing scientific and technical guidance for the development and implementation of SyS systems for both human and animal health.

Objective

To present the Guidelines for implementing syndromic surveillance (SyS) systems at a national, regional or local level.

Currently Scotland has a number of influenza surveillance schemes, including âflu-spotter’ practices, and enhanced surveillance general practices that submit clinical samples for virological testing (SERVIS practices). This information feeds annually into the European Influenza Surveillance Scheme1. Information from the systems is seasonal, and limited geographically covering 6% and 3% of the population respectively. The utilisation by Scottish community physicians (general practitioners, GP’s) of the same administration system in over 80% of settings - the General Practice Administration System for Scotland (GPASS) - offers an alternative approach to influenza surveillance with some additional benefits.

Objective

To develop and pilot an enhanced primary care surveillance system of influenza-like illness in Scotland, record influenza vaccine uptake and estimate vaccine effectiveness in season in real time.

To compare NHS24 data with a range of laboratory and other surveillance systems to further explore its potential utility in communicable disease management.

This abstract describes an Electronic Surveillance System for Infectious Disease Outbreaks used by all federal levels in Germany and comments on timelyness and comprehensiveness of informations about outbreak settings and infection sources.

This paper describes a method to predict syndromic data for surveillance of public health using the method of recursive least squares and a new method of correcting for the day of week effect in order to have a prediction of the background upon which detections of actual events can be computed

A common problem in syndromic surveillance using ED department data is temporary gaps in the data received from individual ED departments caused by delays in receiving the data.

Currently most syndromic surveillance systems provide information about the status of the data sources feeding into the system, for example on the home page of the system, but do not show the effects of any missing data sources on individual derived data elements (except in that graphs may show obvious drops in counts on days when data sources are missing).

Routine primary care data provide the means to systematically monitor a variety of syndromes which could give early warning of health protection issues (microbiological and chemical). It is possible to track milder illnesses which may not present to hospitals (e.g. chicken pox, conjunctivitis) or illnesses for which laboratory specimens are not routinely taken (e.g. influenza). Real-time data are also needed to respond to major health protection incidents.

Objective

To describe the arrangements for Primary Care Surveillance in the UK and provide examples of the benefits of this work for Public Health.

Influenza affects millions of people and causes about 36,000 deaths in the United States each winter. Pandemics of influenza emerge at irregular intervals. National influenza surveillance is used to detect the emergence and spread of influenza virus variants and to monitor influenza-related morbidity and mortality. Existing surveillance consists of seven data types, which are reported weekly. Newly available national electronic data sources created as part of the routine delivery of medical care might supplement current data sources. Nurse call data offer national coverage, are timely, and do not require any extra manual data entry. Using such data for influenza-like illness (ILI) surveillance may lead to earlier detection of ILI in the community, both because people with ILI may call a nurse line before seeking care at a health-care facility and because the data are more timely than existing weekly data.

Objective

Our purpose was to compare nurse call data for respiratory and ILI against CDC national influenza surveillance data from the 2004-2005 season by region to determine if the call data were informative and might allow earlier detection of influenza activity.