DPH uses its State Electronic Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (SendSS) Syndromic Surveillance (SS) Module to collect, analyze and display results of emergency department patient chief complaint data from hospitals throughout Georgia.
Objective
Describe how the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) uses syndromic surveillance to initiate review by District Epidemiologists (DEs) to events that may warrant a public health response (1).
Advanced cancer treatments and research have been helping reduce cancer mortality nationally and in Wisconsin. However, chronic health disparities in cancer remain a major public health concern as not all population subgroups have equal accesses to these healthcare benefits. Previous cancer studies showed that cancer health disparities persisted among racial populations had primarily focused on the entire state of Wisconsin. The southeastern region Wisconsin, the greater Milwaukee metropolitan area, is home to 83% of Wisconsin’s African American population, and includes one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the United States. Because of this, better understanding of cancer trends in the southeastern Wisconsin region can assist in targeting a focal point to more effectively use resources to eliminate health disparities in Wisconsin.
Objective
To assesse health disparities in all-site cancer incidence and mortality rates, and stage of specific cancer diagnosis (female breast cancer and colorectal cancer) compared between African American and white populations of southeastern Wisconsin during 2007-2011.
Norovirus, commonly referred to as the winter vomiting disease, is the most common cause of gastroenteritis worldwide, with the total number of cases reported per year in Ontario second only to the common cold. The disease is highly infectious, requires a low infectious dose, and is well-known to cause large outbreaks in closely confined populations. While deaths are rare, hospitalization and longterm sequelae are more likely to occur in at-risk populations, such as the elderly or immunocompromised. Action to reduce the number of norovirus infections per year is required due to its health and economic burden. It is estimated that norovirus infections cost the United States 2.5 billion CAD and the United Kingdom close to 200 million CAD per year in health care costs alone. While laboratory surveillance is practiced in Ontario to detect norovirus outbreaks, early detection remains a challenge. This project aims to utilize syndromic surveillance with TeleHealth Ontario data in order to develop an early warning system mitigating the impact of norovirus outbreaks.
Internet based technologies are becoming quite prominent among today’s generation due to its easy accessibility through computer or phone devices. Internet’s relative anonymity leads high risk groups to find it easier to meet sexual partners with similar characteristics through dating sites like Grindr, Jack’D, Adams4Adams etc. and mainstream social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. According to various studies, young MSMs prefer to use dating sites and social networking sites more as a source to meet sexual partners than older MSMs.
Objective
To assess the usage of dating sites and social networking sites for finding sexual partners among newly diagnosed HIV positive MSMs in Harris County in 2014
Traditional infectious disease epidemiology is built on the foundation of high quality and high accuracy data on disease and behavior. Digital infectious disease epidemiology, on the other hand, uses existing digital traces, re-purposing them to identify patterns in health-related processes. Medical claims are an emerging digital data source in surveillance; they capture patient-level data across an entire population of healthcare seekers, and have the benefits of medical accuracy through physician diagnoses, and fine spatial and temporal resolution in near real-time. Our work harnesses the large volume and high specificity of diagnosis codes in medical claims to improve our understanding of the mechanisms driving spatial variation in reported influenza activity each year. The mechanisms hypothesized to drive these patterns are as varied as: environmental factors affecting transmission or virus survival, travel flows between different populations, population age structure, and socioeconomic factors linked to healthcare access and quality of life. Beyond process mechanisms, the nature of surveillance data collection may affect our interpretation of spatial epidemiological patterns, particularly since influenza is a non-reportable disease with non-specific symptoms ranging from asymptomatic to severe. Considering the ways in which medical claims are generated, biases may arise from healthcare-seeking behavior, insurance coverage, and medical claims database coverage in study populations.
Objective
To assess the use of medical claims records for surveillance and epidemiological inference through a case study that examines how ecological and social determinants and measurement error contribute to spatial heterogeneity in reports of influenza-like illness across the United States.
According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), binge drinking causes over half of the 88,000 excessive alcohol use deaths and costs approximately $149 billion dollars annually in the United States. Additionally, excessive alcohol use can increase the risk of many other health problems, including injuries and cancer, placing a large burden on public health. In Franklin County, Ohio, The Ohio State University (OSU) football games are an occasion of binge drinking for the student body and Columbus population alike. The purpose of this study is to determine if the binge drinking population is significantly different during football games.
Objective
Identify any relationship between alcohol-related emergency department visits in Franklin County, Ohio and Ohio State University football games.
NYS (excluding NYC) has a very robust Communicable Disease Electronic Surveillance System (CDESS). This system provides disease specific modules, as well as a tracking system for contacts, and a perinatal infant tracking system. This system provides an easy way for users to quickly download a file with all of their data.
NYS (excluding NYC) tracks, on average, 300 infants of hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) positive mothers annually. CDESS provides an infant tracking module for local health departments (LHDs) to enter and monitor vaccine information, add multiple infants per mother, and track patient movement and loss to follow-up. The tool allows LHDs to analyze infants’ data by birth year cohort, with all of their current vaccination and serology information available in one record.
In 2013 and 2014, more than 13,000 cases of gonorrhea were reported to CDESS in NYS (excluding NYC). From November 2013 through May 2014, only 61% of cases were adequately treated with a regimen recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) STD Treatment Guidelines for Gonorrhea , and 29% were missing treatment information. The CDESS system allows the LHDs to track patients who have inadequate and/or missing treatment information.
Objective
Improved methods for user analysis of communicable disease surveillance data in New York State (NYS), excluding New York City (NYC).
Stillbirth remained a neglected issue absent from mention in Millennium Development Goals. An estimated 2.6 million babies are stillborn every year with highest rate in Pakistan, 43.1 stillbirths/1000 births. There is lack of good quality prospective population based data in Pakistan regarding burden, timing and causes of stillbirths.
Objective
To determine burden, timing and causes of stillbirths in a prospective cohort of pregnant from a low income community setting in peri urban Karachi
Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) epidemiologists have responded to multiple emergent outbreaks with diverse surveillance needs. During the 2009 H1N1 influenza response, it was necessary to electronically integrate multiple reporting sources and view population-level data, while during the 2014–2015 West African Ebola epidemic, it was necessary to easily collect and view individual level data from travelers to facilitate early detection of potential imported Ebola disease. DPH in-house information technology (IT) staff work closely with epidemiologists to understand and accommodate surveillance needs. Through this collaboration, IT created a robust electronic surveillance and outbreak management system (OMS) to accommodate routine reporting of notifiable diseases and outbreak investigations, and surveillance during emergent events.
Objective
To describe how flexible surveillance systems can be rapidly adapted and deployed, and increase the efficiency and accuracy of surveillance, during responses to outbreaks and all hazard emergent events.
Rabies is endemic in Tanzania and has circulated on Pemba Island since the late 1990s. In 2010, an elimination programme was initiated in Southern Tanzania to demonstrate that human rabies deaths can be eliminated through mass dog vaccinations. We used active surveillance approaches to investigate the dynamics of rabies across the area where this programme was implemented.
Objective
Using active surveillance approaches to investigate the transmission dynamics of rabies on Pemba Island and across Southern Tanzania, whilst a large-scale dog vaccination program was underway, to gain a greater understanding of the dynamics of infection as the disease is driven towards elimination.