Public/Population Health

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

 

A local foundation commissioned a project to determine the leading causes of childhood injury in Wake County, NC. Multiple sources of secondary data, including syndromic surveillance data, were used to describe leading causes of childhood injury in the county.

Objective

To utilize secondary data sources to describe childhood injury and prioritize prevention efforts in Wake County, NC.

 

Public health surveillance guides efforts to detect and monitor disease and injuries, assess the impact of interventions and assist in the management of and recovery from large-scale public health incidents. Today’s ever-present, media-hungry environment pressures public health scientists, researchers and frontline practitioners to provide information, on an almost instantaneous basis, responsive to public and policy maker concerns about specific geographies and specific populations. Actions informed by surveillance information take many forms, such as policy changes, new program interventions, public communications and investments in research. Local, state and federal public health professionals, government leaders, public health partners and the public are dependent on high quality, timely and actionable public health surveillance data. With a charge from the CDC Director, this Surveillance Strategy aims to improve CDC’s overall surveillance capabilities, and by extension those of the public health system at large. The Strategy guides efforts to make essential surveillance systems more adaptable to the rapidly changing technology landscape, more versatile in meeting demands for expanding knowledge about evolving threats to health, and more able to meet the demands for timely and populationspecific and geographically specific surveillance information. The Strategy will also facilitate work to consolidate systems, eliminate unnecessary redundancies in reporting, and reduce reporting burden. These expectations compel this strategy and argue for CDC to lead the public health system in improving the timeliness and availability, as well as the quality and specificity of surveillance data to CDC programs, STLT agencies, and other stakeholders.

Objective

This presentation aims to share the CDC Surveillance Strategy’s goals, initiatives and activities. The surveillance strategy describes how CDC will: 

• enhance accountability, resource use, workforce and innovation for surveillance by establishing a Surveillance Leadership Board, a surveillance workforce plan, and an innovation consortium;
•  accelerate the utilization of emerging tools and approaches to improve the availability, quality, and timeliness of surveillance data by establishing enhanced HIT policy engagement, HIT vendor forums, and informatics innovation projects; and 
• initiate four cross cutting surveillance system initiatives to improve surveillance by addressing data availability, system usability, redundancies, and incorporation of new information technologies

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.

Electronic disease surveillance canonically represents analysis performed on health records with respect to their syndromes, complaints, lab data, etc. This data can tell the story of a patient’s current status but does not provide a holistic look at the where the patient is from. By incorporating census data, a deeper examination of the patient’s area can be performed which may result in discovery of risk factors associated with race, economic status, and culture.

Objective

The objective of this project is to enable a deeper analysis of patient health by correlating patient health records with the census demographic data. Based upon these correlations, the ESSENCE system will be enhanced with new query filtering capabilities.

This year’s conference theme is “Harnessing Data to Advance Health Equity” – and Washington State researchers and practitioners at the university, state, and local levels are leading the way in especially novel approaches to visualize health inequity and the effective translation of evidence into surveillance practice.

Objective

Washington is leading the way in especially novel approaches. Our goal is to share some of these innovative methods and discuss how these are used in State and Local monitoring of Health

Obesity and related chronic diseases cost Canadians several billion dollars annually. Dietary intake, and in particular consumption of carbonated sweetened drinks (soda), has a strong effect on the incidence of obesity and other illness. Marketing research suggests that in-store promotion, and more specifically price discounting, has a strong effect on the purchase of energy-dense products such as soda. Attempts by public health authorities to monitor price discounts are currently limited by a lack of data and methods. Although rarely used in public health surveillance, electronic retail sales data collected around the world by marketing companies such as the Nielsen Corporation have an immense potential to measure dietary choices at high geographical resolution. These scanned sales data are recorded in real-time and they include a detailed product description, price, purchased quantity, store location, and product-specific advertising activities.

Objective

To assess the influence of in-store price discounts on soda purchasing by neighborhood socio-economic status in Montreal, Canada using digital grocery store-level sales data.