Crude mortality could be valuable for infectious disease surveillance if available in a complete and timely fashion. Such data can be of used 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 goals can be achieved with crude mortality monitoring in the Netherlands, a pilot study was set up in 2008 in which death counts were received from Statistics Netherlands.
The aims of this pilot are: 1) Setting up communication and data transmission. 2) Calculating expected mortality counts (depending on the season) and a prediction interval. 3) Detecting deviations in mortality counts above the threshold. 4) Comparing such deviations (and lags hereof) with other public health information (such as sentinel influenza-like-illness surveillance, and web-based selfreported ILI). 4) Evaluating the additional value of such a system for infectious disease public health.
Objective
To evaluate the potential use of mortality data in the Netherlands for real-time surveillance of infectious disease events through a pilot study.