Infectious Disease

All positive laboratory tests of reportable conditions on persons residing in New York State (NYS) are mandated to be sent to the NYS Department of Health (NYSDOH) via ECLRS. NYS, excluding New York City (NYC), receives over 100,000 ECLRS messages on general communicable diseases (CD) and hepatitis (HEP), not including Lyme disease and Influenza, annually. Although ECLRS is integrated with CDESS, the local health departments (LHD) need to review each lab report for proper initiation of a case investigation. Once the investigation is created, the LHD may need supportive evidence to create a reportable case or may dismiss it if evidence does not support the case definition.

Our goal is to follow all ECLRS records from official retrieval by the LHD through CDESS case creation, to ensure all cases are reported and are done so in a timely manner. Cases for diseases that are nationally notifiable are sent to CDC the following week for publication in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Timely reporting to CDC allows for more accurate description of disease occurrence, which is essential for public health planning and response.

Objective

Ensure all reportable communicable disease data coming through the Electronic Clinical Laboratory Reporting System (ECLRS) is reported to the Communicable Disease Electronic Surveillance System (CDESS) in a timely and complete manner.

Since the adoption of antibiotics in the early 20th century, a plethora of clinical pathogens have acquired resistance to one or more modern-day antibiotics. This has resulted in antimicrobial resistance (AMR) being recognized as a severe threat to human and animal health worldwide. Recent work has demonstrated that AMR bacteria are widely prevalent in the environment, perhaps exacerbated by the widespread use of antibiotics for clinical or agricultural purposes.

Objective

To assess the temporal dynamics of airborne bacterial communities in four locations around the National Capital Region and the dispersion of antimicrobial resistant (AMR) genes present within them.

Since April 2012, an integrated syndromic surveillance system in rural China (ISSC) has been established in health facilities in two rural counties of Jiangxi Province, China [1]. The objective of ISSC is to integrate syndromic surveillance with conventional case report system for the early detection of infectious disease outbreak in rural China.

Objective

To evaluate the validity of a syndromic surveillance system in health facilities of rural China, signals generated by Shewhart charts from the reported febrile patients in children were compared with that from the common infectious disease patients reported to the conventional case report system (CISDCP, China Information System for Disease Control and Prevention).

 

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.

While HCV infections are associated with substantial morbidity and mortality in the United States, deaths due to HCV may not be detected well in Utah’s surveillance system. New interferon-free drugs for HCV can result in virologic cure with limited side effects, but treatment is expensive. It will therefore be increasingly important that public health accurately document the prevalence of HCV and outcomes, such as death, to inform policy makers and others who are responsible for allocating resources. A previous analysis conducted in Utah determined that a two-step methodology electronically linking death certificate data to HIV surveillance data was effective at ascertaining previously unreported deaths and cases in the HIVinfected population. Similarly, linkage to death certificate records may also provide an important avenue to identify deaths among the chronic HCV cases included in surveillance data and identify cases of HCV not previously reported to public health in Utah.

Objective

To evaluate the ascertainment of deaths among hepatitis C virus (HCV)-infected persons reported to public health and to identify additional HCV cases not reported to public health in Utah through review of death certificate data.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the epidemic situation on poliomyelitis in the world is not good. Ukraine is on the list of countries certified by WHO as the territory free of polio, and previously, population coverage with scheduled vaccination against polio was 95%.