Disease Surveillance

Reduction in HIV transmission needs continuous, comprehensive and effective communication channels to disseminate messages that will sustain efforts to motivate adolescents to engage in a range of options to reduce the risk of HIV infection. Life skills education, an integral part of school-based AIDS programs that include sexual and reproductive health information, has been a timely prevention effort in schools.1 This has proven to be an effective method in delaying the onset of sexual intercourse, and among sexually experienced youth, in increasing the use of condoms and decreasing the number of sexual partners. Life skills are behaviors that enable individuals to adapt to and deal effectively with the demands and challenges of life. The life skills approach is an interactive, educational methodology that not only focuses on transmitting knowledge but also aims at shaping attitudes and developing interpersonal skills. The main goal of the life skills approach is to enhance young people’s ability to take responsibility for making healthier choices, resisting negative pressures, and avoiding risk behaviors. Limited studies have been done on assessing life skills of adolescents in schools. Findings from this study will provide baseline for programmatic scale up.

Objective

To assess the predictors of life-skills-based HIV/AIDS education on sexual behaviour among secondary school students in South West, Nigeria.

 

GFT is a surveillance tool that gathers data on local internet searches to estimate the emergence of influenza-like illness in a given geographic location in real time.3 Previously, GFT has been proven to strongly correlate with influenza incidence at the national and regional level.2,3 GFT has shown promise as an easily accessed tool to enhance influenza surveillance and forecasting; however, further geographic validation of city-level data is needed. 1,2,6

Objective

To test if Google Flu Trends (GFT) is predictive of the volume of influenza and pneumonia emergency department (ED) visits across multiple United States cities.

 

Active surveillance for influenza is a useful but costly endeavor. In recent years infoveillance tools have been developed to track and analyze data available on the Internet and social media (Eysenbach 2011). While infoveillance tools have been developed, few tools focus on geo-targeted data collection at a local level combined with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) capability.

Objective

We developed geo-targeted social media application program interfaces (APIs) for Twitter and a web-based social media analytics and research testbed (SMART) dashboard to analyze “flu” related tweets. During the 2013-14 flu season, for 10 cities with active surveillance for influenza (ILI), we correlated weekly tweeting rates and visual patterns of flu tweeting rates. To facilitate widespread use and testing of this system, we developed an interactive webbased dashboard “SMART” that allows practitioners to monitor and visualize daily changes of flu trends and related flu news.

 

Cancers are among the leading causes of deaths globally. In subSaharan Africa, cancer-related deaths have been projected to increase significantly in the next few decades. Information on cancer is essential in planning and implementing cancer control and prevention activities. Registration and follow-up of cancer cases to estimate survival are useful tools in cancer control programmes. In Ghana, despite the existence of a national cancer prevention and control strategy, not much attention has been given to the problem. Cancer survival has been found to be poor in most developing countries due to late reporting. While late reporting may be a significant factor in cancer survival, the ability of clinical and community health staff to follow-up on cases can help and provide accurate information on cancer survival.

Objective

To identify challenges to community-based surveillance and follow up of breast cancer cases in Ghana.

 

The East African Community (EAC) is the regional intergovernmental organization of the Republics of Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, the United Republic of Tanzania, and the Republic of Uganda, with its headquarters in Arusha, Tanzania. The East African Community (www.eac.int) is implementing the “One Health” initiative through the “East African Integrated Disease Surveillance Network (EAIDSNet)” which is a regional collaborative effort of the national Ministries responsible for human and animal health as well as the national health research and academic institutions of the five (5) EAC Partner States.

Objective

The main objectives of the Network are to promote cross-border integrated diseases prevention and control through “One Health” approaches and joint action focusing on innovative human, animal and ecosystem health interventions, to among others:1) enhance and strengthen cross-country and cross-institutional collaboration through regional coordination of activities and local community participation, 2) promote exchange and dissemination of appropriate information on Integrated Disease Surveillance (IDS) and other disease control activities, 3) harmonize integrated disease surveillance systems in the region, 4) strengthen capacity for implementing integrated disease surveillance and control activities, and 5) ensure continuous exchange of expertise and best practices for integrated disease surveillance and control of pandemics and epidemics of communicable and vector-borne diseases in the East African Community Partner States (Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania).

LHDs are operating in a changing data environment. As household telephone use declines, national surveys are not sampling large enough populations to report representative local health statistics. As a result, reliable indicators from surveys such as the Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance Survey (BRFSS) are becoming scarce. Soon, these indicators may not be sufficient for county assessments. NC DETECT primarily uses data from emergency departments, the Carolinas Poison Center, and the Pre-hospital Medical Information System (PreMIS) to identify outbreaks and facilitate emergency response. However, while built to aggregate “real-time” data, NC DETECT also provides a source for rich, long-term indicators. The challenge for LHDs is that they may not have the knowledge, training, or technical assistance needed to fully utilize NC DETECT services. This project capitalizes on available human, organizational, and technical resources to increase LHD situational awareness and to demonstrate the usefulness of both “real-time” surveillance data as aggregate indicators of county health, and of low-cost prototyping using Excel’s more advanced Business Intelligence (BI) features.

Objective

This project aims to fill a growing county-level health data gap through the development of a low-cost, Excel-based surveillance tool. This prototype utilizes emergency department data (ED) collected by NC DETECT, a state-wide syndromic surveillance system, in order to visualize, monitor, and compare annual local health indicators for use in local decision making. In this way, the project aims to increase noncommunicable disease surveillance capacity and improve situational awareness within North Carolina local health departments (LHDs).