Surveillance Systems

Real-time monitoring and analysis of vaccine concerns over time and location could help immunisation programmes to tailor more effective and timely strategies to address specific public health concerns. In recent years attempts [1, 2] are being made to develop a more systematic monitoring of broader public vaccine concerns resulting in vaccine refusals and potential disease outbreaks. Automated sentiment analysis software applications are being developed to detect and track the emergence and spread, geographically and temporally, of online social media reports on vaccines by developing a new application for opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Although many of the current approaches for automated sentiment analysis provide a timely method to assess the sentiment of a population towards vaccination, they do not assess beliefs, perceptions and behaviours. Incorporating semantic approach by using ontologies captures the domain knowledge and supports automated extraction and analysis of text in blog posts related to vaccination.

Objective

This paper presents our approach on design and development of an integrated semantic platform to capture the domain knowledge on vaccine sentiments, beliefs, and behaviours using ontologies. The vaccine sentiment ontology (VASON) provides more structure around the vast amount of unstructured data scattered over blog posts to facilitate blog content analysis, and discovering patterns of words or phrases in blogs text (e.g. specifying topics, themes, sentiment, beliefs and so on). It also assists in revealing opinionated claims and assertions in blogs and specifying the authors, forms, functions, geographical locations, audiences of blogs, as well as bloggers’ motives.

The federal meaningful use initiative is a major driver to the establishment of expanded electronic syndromic surveillance capacity across the United States. Much has been documented about the background and requirements for eligible hospitals to achieve the syndromic meaningful use objectives. However, the role and efforts by public health agencies in the syndromic onboarding process, which varies by jurisdiction, is a significant component of the success of meaningful use. 

Objective

This presentation aims to highlight technical approaches, validation activities, outcomes, and lessons learned while onboarding local hospitals through a local health information exchange (HIE) for Meaningful Use Stage 2 syndromic surveillance

HealthMap collects and aggregates information from online sources to generate outbreak alerts based on disease and geographic location. This project will assess the timeliness and sensitivity of HealthMap based on outbreak posts from EpiCom, the Florida Department of Health’s disease outbreak and health incident alert network.

Objective

To assess the outbreak detection utility of HealthMap, a publically available event-based biosurveillance system utilizing various internet-based media resources to identify outbreaks, at the state and local level. Results may help determine whether HealthMap should be monitored more closely as a supplementary surveillance tool.

The costs of addressing specific needs to improve surveillance systems in sub-Saharan Africa are often unknown. For centuries meningococcal meningitis epidemics have occurred every few years in the Sahelian and sub-sahel regions of Africa also referred to as the “African meningitis belt”. A serogroup A meningococcal conjugate vaccine, MenAfriVac®, was licensed in 2009 and introduced in phases through mass immunization campaigns for all 1-29 year olds. The long term health impact of MenAfriVac® can only be determined if strong disease surveillance is in place. The objective was to estimate the costs and assess the performance of meningitis surveillance in Chad to determine resources needed for implementing a district casebased surveillance strategy.

Objective T

his presentation shares findings of a cost and performance evaluation of the meningitis surveillance system in Chad. We will also present methods used to design an operational standard for meningitis surveillance in Chad and a cost extrapolation model for other meningitis affected countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

While HCV infections are associated with substantial morbidity and mortality in the United States, deaths due to HCV may not be detected well in Utah’s surveillance system. New interferon-free drugs for HCV can result in virologic cure with limited side effects, but treatment is expensive. It will therefore be increasingly important that public health accurately document the prevalence of HCV and outcomes, such as death, to inform policy makers and others who are responsible for allocating resources. A previous analysis conducted in Utah determined that a two-step methodology electronically linking death certificate data to HIV surveillance data was effective at ascertaining previously unreported deaths and cases in the HIVinfected population. Similarly, linkage to death certificate records may also provide an important avenue to identify deaths among the chronic HCV cases included in surveillance data and identify cases of HCV not previously reported to public health in Utah.

Objective

To evaluate the ascertainment of deaths among hepatitis C virus (HCV)-infected persons reported to public health and to identify additional HCV cases not reported to public health in Utah through review of death certificate data.