Crude mortality could be valuable for infectious disease surveillance if available in a complete and timely fashion. Syndromic surveillance with weekly deaths has been demonstrated to be useful in France. Such data can be of use for detecting, and tracking the impact, of unusual health events (e.g. pandemic influenza) or other unexpected or unknown events of infectious nature. To evaluate whether these aims can be achieved with crude mortality monitoring in the Netherlands, we investigated trends in death notifications and we tested whether retrospective crude mortality trends, at different days of delay, reflect known trends in infectious pathogens that are associated with death (such as influenza).
Objective
To evaluate the potential of mortality data in the Netherlands for real-time surveillance of infectious events.