Living in a closely connected and highly mobile world presents many new mechanisms for rapid disease spread and in recent years, global disease surveillance has become a high priority. In addition, much like the contribution of non-traditional medicine to curing diseases, non-traditional data streams are being considered of value in disease surveillance. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has been funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to determine the relevance of data streams for an integrated global biosurveillance system through the use of defined metrics and methodologies. Specifically, this project entails the evaluation of data streams either currently in use in surveillance systems or new data streams having the potential to enable early disease detection. An overview of this project will be presented, together with results of data stream evaluation. This project will help gain an understanding of data streams relevant to early warning/monitoring of disease outbreaks.
Objective:
The overall objective of this project is to provide a robust evaluation of data streams that can be leveraged from existing and developing national and international disease surveillance systems, to create a global disease monitoring system and provide decision makers with timely information to prepare for and mitigate the spread of disease.