Syndromic Surveillance for a Large Respiratory Disease Outbreak by Legionella in the Netherlands

To evaluate the added value of a syndromic surveillance system in detecting a large severe respiratory disease outbreak with a point-source we used the Legionnaires' disease (LD) outbreak of 1999 in the Netherlands as a case-study. We retrospectively simulated a prospective syndromic surveillance for space-time clusters of patients with pneumonia in hospital records to detect the LD outbreak.