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Early Warning

In November 2002 a NATO summit meeting issued an initiative calling for member states to begin development of an interoperable disease surveillance system that had the ability to give early warning in the event of an attack on armed forces using weapons of mass destruction. In response, the French military have developed the “Projet de Surveillance Spatiale des épidémies au Sein des Forces Armées en Guyane” (2SE FAG), a prototype real-time syndromic surveillance system based on fever case reporting which has been in operation among armed forces personnel in French Guiana since October 2004. Between January and June 2006, French Guiana experienced the largest epidemic of dengue fever in its history. During that year, 2255 confirmed cases and many thousands more suspected cases were recorded among the civilian population. 2SE FAG issued an alert based on a rise in fever cases among armed forces personnel in week 2 of 2006, 5 weeks before a rise was noticed among the civilian population. Limited evaluations of the system have taken place in the past; this study represents a final evaluation of the system before its possible expansion.

 

Objective

The objective of this study was the evaluation of the syndromic surveillance system 2SE FAG which operates among armed forces personnel in French Guiana using the “Framework for Evaluating Public Health Surveillance Systems for Early Detection of Outbreaks,” published by CDC.

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on

ESSENCE receives and analyzes data for the Military Health System’s (MHS) 9 million beneficiaries resulting in approximately 90,000 daily outpatient and emergency department visits worldwide. In May 2008, MHS released ESSENCE Version 2.0, a system-wide upgrade which includes the following enhancements: improved system security, additional reporting and display capabilities, laboratory orders, radiology orders, and the ability for users to define their own syndrome groups.

 

Objective

As an evolving syndromic surveillance system, ESSENCE has recently undergone some significant improvements and new additional capabilities. We present three of these impactful enhancements and evaluate their added value to military public health and preventive medicine providers and system users. Specific Version 2.0 enhancements include: (1) laboratory orders (2) radiology orders and (3) the ability for users to create their own syndrome groups for outbreak classification and detection.

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on

Reportable disease case data are entered into Merlin by all 67 county health departments in Florida and assigned confirmed, probable, or suspect case status. De-identified reportable disease data from Merlin are sent to ESSENCE-FL once an hour for further analysis and visualization using tools in the surveillance system. These data are available for ad hoc queries, allowing users to monitor disease trends, observe unusual changes in disease activity, and to provide timely situational awareness of emerging events. Based on system algorithms, reportable disease case weekly tallies are assigned an awareness status of increasing intensity from normal to an alert category. These statuses are constantly scrutinized by county and state level epidemiologists to guide disease control efforts in a timely manner, but may not signify definitive actionable information.

 

Objective

In light of recent outbreaks of pertussis, the ability of Florida Department of Health’s (FDOH) Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE-FL) to detect emergent disease outbreaks was examined. Through a partnership with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL), FDOH developed a syndromic surveillance system, ESSENCE-FL, with the capacity to monitor reportable disease case data from Merlin, the FDOH Bureau of Epidemiology’s secure webbased reporting and epidemiologic analysis system for reportable diseases. The purpose of this evaluation is to determine the utility and application of ESSENCE-FL system generated disease warnings and alerts originally designed for use with emergency department chief complaint data to reportable disease data to assist in timely detection of outbreaks in promotion of appropriate response and control measures.

Submitted by hparton on

The Triple-S project (Syndromic Surveillance Systems in Europe, www.syndromicsurveillance.eu), co-financed by the European Commission and involving twenty four organizations from fourteen countries was launched in September 2010 with the following objectives 1) performing an inventory of existing or planned SyS systems in Europe both in animal and public health, 2) building a network of experts involved in SyS 3) producing guidelines to implement SyS systems, 4) developing synergies between human and animal health SyS systems. The project is based on a cooperation between human and animal health experts, as supported by the One Health initiative [1].

Objective: 

The objective of this study, based on the Triple-S project outputs, was to present the existing synergies between human and animal health syndromic surveillance (SyS) systems in Europe and a proposal to enhance this kind of collaboration.

 

Submitted by Magou on

In a 2007 survey of public health officials in the United States, International Society for Disease Surveillance found that only 7% used pharmacy prescription sales data for surveillance (1). There have been many reports suggesting effective use of prescription sales data in syndromic surveillance (2, 3, 4, 5). Community pharmacies can provide a valuable supplementary tool for syndromic surveillance of infectious diseases.

Objective

To examine if the prescription sales data from a large retail pharmacy chain in the US were comparable to Google Flu trends and CDC’s US ILI Network data as flu activity indicator.

 

 

Submitted by uysz on

Wearable devices are a low cost, minimally invasive way to monitor health. Sensor data provides real-time physiological indictors of an individual’s health status without the requirement of health care professionals or facilities. Information gleamed from wearable sensors can be used to better understand physiological stressors and prodromal symptoms. In addition, this data can be used to monitor individuals that are in high risk of health-related problems. However, raw data from wearable sensors can be overwhelming to process and laborious to monitor for an individual and, even more so, for a group of individuals. Often specific combination of ranges of sensor readings are indicative of changes to health status and need to be evaluated together or used to calculate specific signal parameters. In addition, the environment surrounding the individual needs to be considered when interpreting the data. To address these issues, PNNL has developed an application that collects, analyzes, and integrates wearable sensor data with geographic landscape and weather information to provide a real-time early alert and situational awareness tool for monitoring the health of groups and individuals.

Objective:

The Wearable Sensor Application developed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) provides an early warning system for stressors to individual and group health using physiologic and environmental indicators. The application integrates health monitoring parameters from wearable sensors, e.g., temperature and heart rate, with relevant environmental parameters, e.g., weather and landscape data, and calculates the corresponding physiological strain index. The information is presented to the analyst in a group and individual view with real-time alerting of abnormal health parameters. This application is the first of its kind being developed for integration into the Defense Threat Reduction Agency's Biosurveillance Ecosystem (BSVE).

Submitted by elamb on
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