Surveillance Systems

1) Describe Arizonaís integrated influenza surveillance for school children with a retrospective analysis of data from multiple sources including School-based Syndromic Surveillance Program (SSSP), laboratory-confirmed influenza case reports, sentinel influenza-like illness (ILI) reports, and hospital discharge data. 2) Demonstrate how ILI data collected from SSSP can be integrated into evidence from other data sources to prospectively monitor and detect early increases in influenza among school children.

Objective. This paper describes Project Argus, a novel foreign biological event detection and tracking system.

The paper outlined the major findings and statistical results of syndromic surveillance system in Taiwan since year 2000.

In order to be best prepared to identify health events using electronic disease surveillance systems, it is vital for users to participate in regular exercises that realistically simulate how events may present in their system following disease manifestation in the community. Furthermore, it is necessary that users exercise methods of communicating unusual occurrences to other intra and extra-jurisdictional investigators quickly and efficiently to determine first, if an event actually exits and if one does its characteristics. A simulation exercise held in the National Capital Region (NCR) in the spring of this year exercised a novel format for engaging users while testing the utility of an embedded event communication tool.

Objective

This is a description of an innovative design and format used to exercise public health preparedness in a tri-jurisdictional disease surveillance system in the spring of 2006.

Since we donít know when such a disaster may occur, we have to perform this syndromic surveillance routinely, and thus the system should be automatic. Namely, information is drawn from electronic medical records (EMR), and is statistical analyzed, aberrations are detected and then Results are reported by e-mail or HP. It is preferable that this system be fully automatic. Though many systems of this type have been developed in the US, they have not been well developed in Japan. So as to develop such a system, we made a prototype system and have been performing prospectively and evaluating the system.

So as to be able to detect nosocomial outbreaks at an early stage, we examine the construction of a syndromic surveillance system for inpatients who have fever, respiratory symptoms, diarrhea, vomiting or rash and evaluate its statistical properties.

We present a systematic empirical comparison of five recently proposed expectation-based scan statistics, in order to determine which methods are most successful for which spatial disease surveillance tasks.

This paper describes a modular approach to surveillance system design, ensuring flexibility, scalability and fault tolerance.

Poison control centers (PCCs) provide a new source of real-time symptom data that could enhance surveillance systems for foodborne disease outbreaks (FBDOs) through more timely public health department interventions. PCCs provide treatment advice to callers with suspected foodborne illnesses before they seek medical care. The Arizona Poison and Drug and Information Center (APDIC) and the Pima County Health Department (PCHD) are currently evaluating the usefulness of the APDIC’s data collection and triage system to provide early detection of FBDOs in Pima County. Our previous study found that PCC callers with a diarrheal/gastrointestinal syndrome were not duplicative of the cases investigated by PCHD, suggesting that they represent two independent data sets. Evaluating the usefulness of a syndromic surveillance system in terms of its impact on public health is consistent with the CDC’s objectives for improving surveillance. Systems that identify too many cases may overwhelm a health department’s surveillance ability, while too few cases may prevent effective identification of outbreaks.

Objective

This study was designed to test the use of high disease transmission risk criteria in callers to a regional poison control center meeting a predefined case definition for diarrheal/gastrointestinal syndrome as part of an active surveillance program reporting to a county public health department.

To develop an automated system which examines Poison Control Center data and provides (1) early recognition of events, both man-made and naturally-occurring, which may pose a threat to public health, and (2) real-time notification to Poison Specialists, the on-site experts who evaluate those alerts.