Evaluation

The costs of addressing specific needs to improve surveillance systems in sub-Saharan Africa are often unknown. For centuries meningococcal meningitis epidemics have occurred every few years in the Sahelian and sub-sahel regions of Africa also referred to as the “African meningitis belt”. A serogroup A meningococcal conjugate vaccine, MenAfriVac®, was licensed in 2009 and introduced in phases through mass immunization campaigns for all 1-29 year olds. The long term health impact of MenAfriVac® can only be determined if strong disease surveillance is in place. The objective was to estimate the costs and assess the performance of meningitis surveillance in Chad to determine resources needed for implementing a district casebased surveillance strategy.

Objective T

his presentation shares findings of a cost and performance evaluation of the meningitis surveillance system in Chad. We will also present methods used to design an operational standard for meningitis surveillance in Chad and a cost extrapolation model for other meningitis affected countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

The New York City (NYC) syndromic surveillance system has monitored syndromes from NYC emergency department (ED) visits since 2001, using the temporal and spatial scan statistic in SaTScan for aberration detection. Since our syndromic system was initiated, alternative methods have been proposed for outbreak identification. Our goal was to evaluate methods for outbreak detection and apply the best performing method(s) to our daily analysis of syndromic data.

Objective

To evaluate temporal and spatial aberration detection methods for implementation in a local syndromic surveillance system.

The October 2010 eruption of Mt Merapi (the most active volcano in the Indonesia that erupts at 5-years intervals) claimed 141 lives, injured 453 people and displaced at least 278,000 people. This geological event became a disaster as national and international agencies had to step in to assist the Yogyakarta Province and Sleman District Administrations in dealing with the devastation caused by the pyroclastic flows. Because of its cyclic nature the task of the local governments is to improve the hazard mitigation system and to increase the resiliency of the population.

On 22 July 2013 the Volcano spewed ash clouds and people of two villages of the Cangkringan Sub-District evacuated themselves to the local village halls. The hazards posed by the ash clouds of the volcano and by the displacement of vulnerable populations, did cause certain physical and emotional sufferings, but could be controlled by the local administration.

Objective

To examine whether the danger zone District Health Office (DHO) and sub-district Health Centers (HCs) were employing an inter-disaster Public Health Surveillance-Response (PH S-R) System after the October 2010 Mt Merapi eruption and a pre-disaster PH S-R System during the July 2013 Mt Merapi eruption.

In Canada, the economic impact of unhealthy eating is estimated at $6.3 billion annually and in the US the estimated cost is $87 billion. Despite the critical need to identify effective diet-related interventions through empirical evaluation, public health practitioners and researchers lack timely access to representative data sources collected at a fine spatial and temporal resolution. Food surveys, for example, are costly, infrequent, delayed, and subject to biases.

The Nielsen Corporation collects data on food purchasing directly from scanners in grocery and convenience stores around the world. These data hold great potential for public health practice. We were interested in using these data to analyze purchases of regular (sugary) soda and water, before and after two interventions aimed at reducing sugary drink consumption. The first intervention, ‘Gobes-tu ça’, was a counter-advertising campaign targeting the age group with the highest consumption of soda, 12-17 year olds. The second intervention, ‘Sois-futé, bois santé’, targeted elementary school students. Both began in the Fall of 2011 and ramped up over time.

Objective

To demonstrate the utility of automatically captured store-level (i.e. point-of-sale) food purchasing data for the surveillance of dietary patterns before and after interventions. We assessed the effects of two interventions in Montreal, Canada that were intended to reduce the consumption of sugary drinks.

Rabies post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) can prevent fatal encephalitis associated with exposure to the rabies virus. However, overuse and inappropriate administration of rabies PEP are common.1 Mandatory reporting of potential rabies exposures provides opportunities for public health practitioners to monitor the appropriateness of PEP administration and offer recommendations. In Illinois, potential human exposure to rabies, including any person started on PEP and any person with contact to a bat, must be reported to the local health authority. Previous investigations into the completeness of rabies reporting have concluded that active surveillance in addition to mandatory reporting may be useful.2 As rabies PEP is often given in an emergency department setting, syndromic surveillance records may provide a basis for estimating completeness of reporting and identifying candidates for active surveillance follow up.

Objective

To determine whether unreported cases of potential human exposure to rabies can be detected using an emergency department (ED) syndromic surveillance system and to assess both reporting completeness and compliance with clinical guidelines related to rabies exposures in suburban Cook County.

With economic pressures to shift the care of community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) to the ambulatory setting, there is a need to ensure safety of outpatients with CAP. The use of claims data alone remains the primary strategy for identifying these patients, but billing information often does not match the clinical diagnosis and does not have the ability to find unrecognized cases. In our previous work, an automated pneumonia case detection algorithm (CDA) was able to detect cases of CAP with positive predictive value of 71%. For this study, we begin to illustrate how this type of surveillance system may assist in evaluating the quality of outpatient care for CAP.

Per a frequently asked questions document on the ISDS website, approximately two thirds of HL7 records received in BioSense do not provide a Visit ID. As a result, BioSense data processing rules use the patient ID, facility ID and earliest date in the record to identify a unique visit. If the earliest dates in records with the same patient ID and facility ID occur within the same 24-hour time frame, those two visits are combined into one visit and the earliest date will be stored. The ED data sent by hospitals to NC DETECT include unique visit IDs and these are used to identify unique visits in NC DETECT. These data are also sent twice daily to BioSense. In order to assess the potential differences between the NC DETECT ED data in NC DETECT and the NC DETECT ED data in BioSense, an initial analysis of the 24-hour rule was performed.

Objective

NC DETECT emergency department (ED) data were analyzed to assess the impact of applying the BioSense “24-hour rule” that combines ED visits into a single visit if the patient ID and facility ID are the same and the earliest recorded dates occur within the same 24-hour time frame.

The majority of farmed animals are sent to slaughterhouses, making them a focal point for potential collection of health data. However, these data are not always available to health officials, and remain under-used for cattle health monitoring. Meat inspection data are mainly non-diagnostic (condemned portion and reasons for condemnation) and cover a large population. These characteristics make them a good candidate for syndromic surveillance. Whole carcass condemnation rate is linked to acute infections which reduces the dilution bias due to the variable period of time between cattle infection and the detection of lesions at the slaughterhouse.

Objective

The objective of the work was to assess the performance of several algorithms for outbreak detection based on weekly proportions of whole carcass condemnation

Syndromic surveillance uses pre-diagnostic data to inform communicable disease prevention and control. Among health zones in the province of Alberta, Canada, practices employed by public health when using elementary school illness-cause absenteeism data vary widely.

Objective

The objective of this study was to carry out a mixed-methods evaluation of the ability of standardized supports to improve the usefulness of school absenteeism syndromic surveillance for public health in Alberta.

Since 2004, the French syndromic surveillance system Oscour® has been implemented by the national institute for public health surveillance (InVS) and is daily used to detect and follow-up various public health events all over the territory [1]. Beginning with 23 ED in 2004, the coverage and data quality have permanently been increasing until including about 650 ED in August 2015. Initially based on a voluntary participation of ED, a mandatory transmission has been decided in July 2013, with major modification on the structural organization of the data transmission in some regions and on coding practices of the new ED. Besides this juridical context, the system is based on automatically data collection by ED physicians without recording added information for public health surveillance. This represents the main theorical condition to ensure stability and quality, even in case of occurrence of major public health events susceptible to drastically increase the workload [2].

Objective

Identification of the main factors influencing the stability and the quality of the French Emergency departments (ED) syndromic surveillance system.