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Communicable Disease Surveillance

A large event such as the Super Bowl that attracts over 120,000 visitors to an area within a short period of time has the potential to increase the risk of communicable diseases and environmental hazards in a community in addition to the possibility of a bioterrorist attack. Though Miami-Dade County Health Department has in place a syndromic surveillance system, additional public health measures were implemented to ensure the health and safety of all residents and visitors in the weeks surrounding the February 4th event.

 

OBJECTIVE

To identify unusual patterns of communicable diseases, health events or bioterrorism-related activity in Miami-Dade County immediately before, during and after Super Bowl XLI.

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on

The Death Certificate Surveillance was implemented in October 2001 to enhance New Hampshire's ability to monitor for bioterrorism and other public health threats, such as communicable diseases and chemical exposures. In 2003, this surveillance system was automated. Death certificates become available for review by disease surveillance staff within 24 hours of filing. Learning objectives: 1. Discuss the value of death certificate surveillance in detecting communicable disease 2. Explain the death certificate review process 3. Describe how death certificate surveillance can be automated.

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on

Epidemiologists, public health agencies and scientists increasingly augment traditional surveillance systems with alternative data sources such as, digital surveillance systems utilizing news reports and social media, over-the-counter medication sales, and school absenteeism. Similar to school absenteeism, an increase in reservation cancellations could serve as an early indicator of social disruption including a major public health event. In this study, we evaluated whether a rise in restaurant table availabilities could be associated with an increase in disease incidence.

 

Objective

The objective of this study is to evaluate whether trends in online restaurant table reservations can be used as an early indicator for a disease outbreak.

Submitted by hparton on

ECDC long term strategies for surveillance include analysis of trends of communicable disease of public health importance for European Union countries to guide public health actions. The European Surveillance System (TESSy) holds data on 49 communicable diseases reported by 30 countries for at least the past five years. To simplify time related analysis using surveillance data, ECDC launched a project to enable descriptive and routine TSA without the need for complex programming.

Objective

To discuss challenges and opportunities in the introduction of an automated approach for time series analysis (TSA) regarding epidemiological methodology for generation of hypotheses, steps to be performed and interpretation of outputs.

 

Submitted by uysz on

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

The emergence of new influenza strains including H1N1, H5N1, H3N2v as well as other respiratory pathogens such as SARS, along with generally weak information about household and community transmission of influenza, enforce the need for augmented influenza surveillance. At the same time, Internet penetration and access has grown, with 82% of American adults using the Internet, enabling transfer and communication of information that can be collected and aggregated in near real-time. Surveillance targeted towards influenza in other countries, and towards malaria in India, has previously been executed with good user engagement. In this study, we created an online participatory influenza surveillance tool in the United States, called Flu Near You.

Objective

To develop a participatory system for monitoring the activity of influenza-like-illness among the United States general population.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

Communicable disease surveillance is a core Public Health function. Many diseases must be reported to state and federal agencies (1). To manage and adjudicate such cases, public health stakeholders gather various data elements. Since cases are identified in various healthcare settings, not all information sought by public health is available (2) resulting in varied field completeness, which affects the measured and perceived data quality. To better understand this variation, we evaluated public health practitioners’ perceived value of these fields to initiate or complete communicable disease reports.

Objective:

To assess communicable disease report fields required by public health practitioners and evaluate the variation in the perceived utility of these fields.

 

Submitted by Magou on

Sexually transmitted disease treatment guidelines have incrementally added repeat testing recommendations for Chlamydia trachomatis infections over time, including test-of-cure 3 to 4 weeks following completion of treatment for pregnant women and test-of-reinfection for all patients approximately 3 months after infection. However, few studies have investigated adherence to these recommendations and whether the evolution of guidelines have led to changes in repeat testing patterns over time.

Objective:

To evaluate current rates and temporal trends in adherence with national guidelines recommending chlamydia test-of-cure for pregnant females and test-of-reinfection for all patients.

Submitted by elamb on

In May 2015, the MERS-CoV outbreaks in South Korea was sparkled from a hospital of Gyeonggi-do province. In response to this outbreak, the provincial government and infectious disease control center (GIDCC) initiated an emergency department (ED) based Gyeonggi-do provincial acute febrile illness (AFI) surveillance network (GAFINet) to monitor for a subsequent outbreak of emerging or imported infectious diseases since September 2016. Gyeonggi-do province is located in the North-West of South Korea, surrounds the capital city Seoul, and borders North Korea (Figure 1). Considering the geographical coverage, GAFINet Initiative involves ten hospitals, consisted of four university-affiliated hospitals and six provincial medical centers in Gyeonggi-do province. These hospitals participated in this network voluntarily, and most staffs including five infectious diseases specialists had direct or indirect experiences in dealing with MERS-CoV patients.

Objective:

The objectives are to introduce a provincial level surveillance system, which has been initiated in response to the MERS-CoV outbreak of South Korea, and describe findings from systematic investigation of individual admissions attributed to acute febrile illness for the first year.`

Submitted by elamb on
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