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Case-Finding

Description

Early Aberration Reporting System (EARS, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, EARS Program, MS C-18, Atlanta, GA, USA) is a freeware surveillance tool that can be downloaded from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s website (http://emergency.cdc.gov/surveillance/ears/). It was designed for quick set-up and customization for automated monitoring of emergency department and other syndromic data sources, including, but not limited to, 911 calls, school absenteeism,

and over-the-counter medication sales. The United States’ city, county, state health departments, and various international public health organizations, use EARS software to conduct daily, near-real time surveillance of conditions easily defined by patient-reported complaints, and physician diagnoses (for example, influenza-like illness, gastroenteritis, asthma, heat-related illness). It is also used to conduct suspect case finding during outbreaks, natural disaster responses, verify that potential threats are not manifested in communities, and for supporting ad hoc analyses and research.

 

Objective

The objective of this poster is to highlight recent upgrades to the EARS software, and identify features planned for future releases.

Submitted by hparton on
Description

A major goal of biosurveillance is the timely detection of an infectious disease outbreak. Once a disease has been identified, another very important goal is to find all known cases of the disease to assist public health investigators. Natural language processing (NLP) systems may be able to assist in identifying epidemiological variables and decrease time-consuming manual review of records.

 

Objective

To identify epidemiologically important factors such as infectious disease exposure history, travel or specific variables from unstructured data using NLP methods.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

In the United States, 800,000-1.4 million people are chronically infected with hepatitis B virus (HBV); these persons are at increased risk for chronic liver disease and its sequelae. Current national viral hepatitis surveillance is a passive laboratory-initiated reporting system to state or local health departments with only 39 health departments reporting chronic HBV infection in the National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System. Since active HBV surveillance can be expensive and labor-intensive, the ICD-9 coding system has been proposed for surveillance of chronic hepatitis B.

 

Objective

To evaluate the sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values of the ICD-9 coding system for surveillance of chronic hepatitis B virus infection (HBV) using data from an observational cohort study in which ICD-9-coded HBV cases were validated by chart review

Submitted by hparton on
Description

Introduction

Measles is a vaccine preventable disease that has been successfully eliminated in some parts of the world. It causes high morbidity and mortality with the potential of large outbreaks. About a third of reported measles cases involve one or more complications including diarrhea, pneumonia, otitis media, blindness, post infections encephalitis and subacute sclerosing panencephalitis. It is however, one of the leading causes of childhood morbidity and mortality in Nigeria despite availability of safe and effective vaccines.

Objective

The objective of this study was to describe the performance of the measles surveillance in Lagos, characterize the epidemiologic pattern of measles infection and determine the measles vaccine efficacy.

Submitted by uysz on
Description

Leprosy is a chronic infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae. It is a contagious disease that affects the skin, mucous membrane, and nerves causing discoloration and lumps on the skin and in severe cases disfigurement and deformities. The mode of transmission remains uncertain, but is believed that M.leprae is spread from person to person primarily as a nasal droplet infection. The incubation period for a bacterial disease generally is 5 – 7 years. Progress in the fight against leprosy has been one of the greatest public health success and in the country, was eliminated in the mid-1990s. However on the 22nd August 2017 a confirmed leprosy cases was reported by the National Referral Hospital.

Objective:

To strengthen public health surveillance to monitor neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) like leprosy as a control measure to avert disabilities in the Kingdom of Swaziland.

Submitted by elamb on