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Infectious Diseases

Description

Clinical and public health microbiology laboratories of the world are a rich, underutilized resource in monitoring the changing epidemiology of microbial populations worldwide. Two areas of public health importance in which effective use of relevant local data are critical include: 1. guiding local treatment guidelines, informed by knowledge of local patterns of infection and antimicrobial resistance; and 2. the early identification and characterization of outbreaks.

Most laboratories in the developed world and many in the developing world have clinical databases designed to meet the day-to-day needs of clinical reporting, specimen processing, billing, and permanent information storage. Unfortunately, most such systems were not developed with the epidemiological needs of microbiologists, infection control staff, public health authorities, and policy-makers in mind. To address this critical gap, our group at the WHO Collaborating Centre for Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance has developed the WHONET and BacLink softwares to support local, national, and international infectious disease surveillance programs.

 

Objective

This paper describes two free softwares developed for the automated and semi-automated capture, processing, and analysis of microbiology laboratory data. Applications include early detection of hospital and community outbreaks, guiding local treatment guidelines and public health policy, and immediate alert of important pathogens and potential errors in laboratory testing.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Crude mortality could be valuable for infectious disease surveillance if available in a complete and timely fashion. Syndromic surveillance with weekly deaths has been demonstrated to be useful in France. Such data can be of use for detecting, and tracking the impact, of unusual health events (e.g. pandemic influenza) or other unexpected or unknown events of infectious nature. To evaluate whether these aims can be achieved with crude mortality monitoring in the Netherlands, we investigated trends in death notifications and we tested whether retrospective crude mortality trends, at different days of delay, reflect known trends in infectious pathogens that are associated with death (such as influenza).

 

Objective

To evaluate the potential of mortality data in the Netherlands for real-time surveillance of infectious events.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Infectious disease surveillance is important for disease control as well as to inform prevention and treatment [1]. While influenza surveillance data coverage and quality has improved significantly in recent years due to resource investments and advances in information technology, the need remains for improvements in data dissemination to the wider community.

Objective

This paper describes a review of modes and styles of the online dissemination of national influenza surveillance data.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

In the past year, three major health care organizations – the American Veterinary Medical Association, the American Medical Association and the Society for Tropical Veterinary Medicine – have officially endorsed the concept of “One Health” recognizing the continuum of communicable infectious disease from humans to animals and animals to humans. Further, there is widespread recognition that continuous robust surveillance of animals is beneficial not only to animal health but to food safety for humans and for early warning of naturally-occurring novel diseases (all of significance have been zoonotic for the past 20 years in the US and elsewhere) and for detecting bioterrorism events (with only one exception, all human bioterrorism agents are animal diseases.)

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Schistosomiasis is a chronic infection caused by flukes belonging to the genus Schistosoma. At least 200 million people, in 74 countries, are infected with the disease and at least 600 million are at risk of infection [1]. Like the majority of the parasitic diseases, schistosomiasis is influenced by human behavior, mainly water use practices and indiscriminate urination and defecation, but also, failure to take advantage of available screening services.

Objective

The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of health education and treatment interventions on the prevalence, intensity and perception of urinary schistosomiasis among school children in three rural communities in Cameroon.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

I Medical services for outpatients are well developed due to universal public health insurance. Even patients who have mild symptoms can visit a clinic freely in Japan. Thus the monitoring of outpatients provides very timely information to detect unusual events. On the other hand, EMRs haven't had much penetration, less than 10% at clinics and 20% at hospitals. Moreover, almost nobody uses HL7 or other standards for EMRs. Therefore, it is very difficult to develop a syndromic surveillance system using EMRs like the U.S. We have to develop a system for each EMR and it has a heavy cost. In Japan, there are about 40 thousand pharmaciesand almost half of drugs prescribed are delivered through pharmacies. Almost all pharmacies record prescriptions electronically. Objective: So that full automatic syndromic surveillance cover the whole of nation, we construct the system using the information of prescription.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

While traditional means of surveillance by governments, multi-national agencies, and institutional networks assist in reporting and confirming infectious disease outbreaks, these formal sources of information are limited by their geographic coverage and timeliness of information flow. In contrast, rapid global reach of electronic communication has resulted in the advent of informal sources of information on outbreaks. Informal resources include discussion sites, online news media, individual and organization reports and even individual search records. The earliest descriptions of the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in Guangdon Province, south China came from informal reports. However, system development to date has been geared toward knowledge management and strategies for interpreting these data are underdeveloped. There is a need to move from simple knowledge reorganization to an analytic approach for disseminating timely yet specific signals.

 

Objective

Internet-based resources such as discussion sites and online news sources have become invaluable sources for a new wave of surveillance systems. The WHO relies on these informal sources for about 65% of their outbreak investigations. Despite widespread use of unstructured information there has been little, if any, data evaluation.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Capital Health is a regional health care organization, which provides services for over one million inhabitants in the Edmonton area of Alberta, Canada. Traditionally, disease surveillance under its jurisdiction has been paper-based and records maintained by different departments in several locations. Before the Alberta Real Time Syndromic Surveillance Net (ARTSSN), there was no centralized database or unified approach to surveillance and automated reporting despite rich electronic health data in the region. The existing labor-intensive manual surveillance process is inefficient and inherently susceptible to human error. Its effectiveness is sub-optimal in detecting outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases, and clusters of injuries or toxic exposures. The ultimate objective of ARTSSN is to enhance public health surveillance through earlier and more sensitive detection of clusters and trends, with subsequent tracking and response through an integrated, automated surveillance and reporting system.

 

Objective

ARTSSN is a pilot public health surveillance project developed for the Capital Health region of Alberta, Canada and funded by Alberta Health and Wellness. This paper describes the advantages of using ARTSSN and comparing information derived from multiple electronic data sources simultaneously for real time syndromic surveillance.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

The Centre for Health Protection in Hong Kong has operated a sentinel surveillance system for infectious diseases at child care centre (CCC) since March 2004, among its multi-faceted disease surveillance systems. Forty-six CCCs have participated in the system and are contributing data weekly on absenteeism and common infectious disease symptoms such as fever, diarrhea, vomiting, and cough. The system was originally driven by a manual data collection mechanism via fax, followed by secondary data input and subsequent analysis. However, such mechanism might sometimes result in delayed data transmission and data loss. As an alternative to accommodate these limitations, a web-based platform is developed to increase the timeliness of data submission by the sentinel CCCs. The new platform not only speeds up data collection and eliminates the need for human data entry, but at the same time delivers summary statistics directly on the web through computer programmes on a real time basis, as soon as data is entered by the provider.

 

Objective

This paper describes the attempt to develop an internet-based community surveillance network to enhance timeliness and sensitivity in detecting community-wide infectious disease outbreaks among young children at CCCs in Hong Kong.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Evidence suggests that transmission within the workplace contributes significantly to the magnitude of a pandemic flu epidemic. A significant number of large organizations have a pandemic plan in place which may help in controlling this manner of transmission. These plans typically include telecommuting and other measures to reduce the need to physically commute to the workplace. Good data are needed in order to obtain valid results from simulation models and to be able to assess the effect of reductions in commuting.

 

Objective

The objective in this study was to explore data on employment and commuting from different sources, using statistical analytic techniques together with geographical experts to obtain information to be provided to modelers in order to help them improve the employment and commuting component of their models, determine potential issues related to these data, and identify problem areas where further investigation is needed.

Submitted by elamb on