Pediatrics

The burden of asthma on the youngest children in Boston is largely characterized through hospitalizations and self-report surveys. Hospitalization rates are highest in Black and Hispanic populations under age five. A study of children living in Boston public housing showed significant risk factors, including obesity and pest infestation, with less than half of the study population being prescribed daily medication.

Information on asthma visits for children 5 years old or younger was requested by the Boston Public Health Commission Community Initiatives Bureau. The information is being used to establish a baseline for an integrated Healthy Homes Program that includes pest management and lead abatement. There is limited experience in using syndromic surveillance data for chronic disease program planning.

Objective

The objective of this study is to report on the use of syndromic surveillance data to describe seasonal patterns of asthma and health inequities among Boston residents, age five and under.

Seasonal influenza epidemics are responsible for over 200,000 hospitalizations in the United States per year, and 39,000 of them are in children. In the United States, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices guides immunization practices, including influenza vaccination, with recommendations revised on an annual basis. For the 2006–2007 flu season, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommendations for influenza vaccination began including healthy children aged 24–59 months (two to four years), a shift that added 10.6 million children to the target group.

Canada has a parallel federal organization, the National Advisory Committee on Immunization, which is responsible for guiding the use of vaccines. Recommendations made by the National Advisory Committee on Immunization and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices around seasonal influenza vaccination was concordant until the 2006–2007 season. Starting in the 2010–2011 season, the National Advisory Committee on Immunization has further expanded its recommendations to additional pediatric age groups by including two- to four-year-olds for targeted seasonal influenza vaccination.

We took advantage of this divergence in policy between two neighboring countries with similar annual seasonal influenza epidemics to try to understand the effects of the

policy change in the United States to expand influenza vaccination coverage to other pediatric populations.

Objective

The objective of this study is to estimate the effect of expanding recommendations for routine seasonal influenza vaccination to include 24–59-month-old children.

The Syndromic Surveillance Program (SSP) of the Acute Disease Epidemiology Section of the Georgia Division of Public Health, provides electronic influenza- like- illness (ILI) data to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network Program that characterizes the burden of influenza in states on a weekly basis.

ILI is defined as a fever of 1001, plus a cough or sore throat. This definition is used to classify ILI by the SSP, as well as in diagnosis at the pediatric hospital system. During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the SSP was provided a daily data transfer to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention to heighten situational awareness of the burden of ILI in Georgia. Throughout the peak of the pandemic, data from the pediatric hospital system identified when the percentage of daily visits for ILI had substantively increased. The data includes patient chief complaint (CC) data from emergency department visits for two facilities at Facilities A and B. The data received by SSP does not include diagnosis data.

Patient emergency department discharge data (DD) for ‘FLU’ was provided to SSP retrospectively to compare with the CC data routinely collected and analyzed. The data was derived from the pediatric health system’s month end, internal, syndromic surveillance report based upon emergency department visits, and including physician’s diagnosis at the time of patient’s discharge. The case definition of ‘FLU’ from the pediatric health system facilities is acute onset of fever, with cough and/or sore throat in the absence of a known cause other than influenza.

Objective

The objective of this study is to describe the difference between patient CC, ILI data provided daily to the Georgia SSP during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, and patient DD subsequently provided for comparison with the SSP from its participating pediatric hospital system, and its two affiliated emergency rooms.

UIs are among the leading causes of injury in children younger than 5 years in NYC. About 3000 calls are received each year by the NYC Poison Control Center (PCC) for this age group. Common UI exposures include medications, cosmetics, household cleaners, foreign bodies, and pesticides. We examined UIs in NYC from January 2010 to July 2014 for children <5 years to investigate the utility of syndromic surveillance in conjunction with the PCC in capturing real-time pediatric UIs over time.

Objective

To describe unintentional ingestions (UIs) in children <5 years using syndromic data from emergency departments in New York City (NYC) from 2010 to 2014.