Presenters
Marc Paladini, MPH, U.S. Department of Transportation
Catherine Cairns
Julia Gunn, MPH, RN, Boston Public Health Commission
Francisco Averhoff, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Shuying Shen
Atar Baer, Public Health - Seattle and King County
Carla Rodriguez
Date and Time
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Host
Effective infectious disease public health surveillance systems are often lacking in resource poor settings. In response, the World Health Organization (WHO) put forword recommnded standards for public health surveillence.[1] Following the recommendations, the WHO Regional Office for Africa (AFRO) in 1998 proposed the Integrated Dieases Surveillance and Response (IDSR) strategy for the prompt detection and response to key communicable diseases in the African region.[2,3] In 2003, Cameroon adopted the IDSR-strategy to fortify surveillance in the country. We describe cholera surveillance within IDSR-strategy, and assess whether its goal of data analysis and rapid response at the district level have been met.
Objective
To describe cholera public health surveillance systems in Cameroon within its hierarchical health system
The emergence of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Corona Virus (MERS-CoV) in 2012 had placed a great concern on the public health institutions globally and in particular in the Arab region. The gaps in knowledge related to the novel virus put the healthcare systems in Qatar and the entire region in critical position amid growing concerns that this virus might take a deadly pattern. As the second reported case in Qatar had a documented relationship with animals, veterinary and environmental health sectors were invited to join the national outbreak control taskforce.
Rwanda government's leadership in embracing One health approach to mitigate and control infectious diseases can be a huge lesson to other developing countries to do the same with astounding results.
Investigation of cases, clusters, and outbreaks of infectious disease is a complex process requiring substantial support from protocols, distributed and cooperative work, and information systems. We set out to identify public health information needs, the types of data required to meet these needs, and the potential alignment with visualizations of this data.
Objective
The goal of this work is to identify specific work practices in disease investigation that would be supported by data visualization, such as identifying exposure, contact, and spatiotemporal clustering.
The recent Ebola outbreak has been described as unprecedented and its public health impact in terms of morbidity, mortality and coverage has been far greater than previously experienced. This outbreak has revealed many weaknesses and inadequacies for disease surveillance and response systems in Africa due to underqualified staff, cultural beliefs and sometimes, lack of trust for formal health care sector performance. Since 2014, Ghana had high risk of seeing EVD cases.
Objective
The objective of this study was to assess the EVD surveillance and response preparedness among frontline health workers in northern Ghana.
West Africa recently experienced the most persistent epidemic of EVD recorded in history. The reported morbidity and mortality of the highly virulent, emerging zoonotic filovirus infection is far larger than all previous epidemics combined. Its spread to Nigeria (Africa’s most populous country) and to densely populated Lagos (a city in Nigeria with approximate combined population of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia) raised significant public health concern. The Federal Ministry of Health was notified of a suspected case of viral haemorrhagic fever on the 22nd July, 2014. A 40-year old male Liberian presented in a private health facility on account of fever, vomiting and diarrhea. On the 23rd July, the index case was confirmed to have EVD and on 25th July, he died.
Objective
To describe the socio-demographic characteristics of Ebola virus disease (EVD) patients and their contacts, magnitude of the outbreak and factors associated with outcome in patients.
The basic reproduction number represents the number of secondary infections expected to be caused by an infectious individual introduced into an entirely susceptible population. It is a fundamental measure used to characterize infectious disease outbreaks and is essential in developing mathematical models to determine appropriate interventions. Much work has been done to investigate methods for estimating the basic reproduction number during the early stages of infectious disease outbreaks. However, these methods often require data that may not be readily available at the beginning of an outbreak. An approach developed by Becker has been widely used to estimate the basic reproduction number using only the final case count and size of the at-risk population. A modification to this approach is proposed that allows estimates to be obtained earlier in an outbreak using only the current case count, number currently ill, and the size of the at-risk population.
Objective
To present a modification to an established approach to estimating the basic reproduction number to allow estimates to be obtained at any point during an outbreak using only the current case count, number currently ill, and the size of the at-risk population.
This report, published January 27, 2017 by the Office of Epidemiology and Prevention Services with the West Virginia Department of Health & Human Resources, is an outbreak report developed in response to an opioid-related overdose incident that occured in Huntington, West Virginia on August 15, 2016.