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Surveillance Systems

The CA/BC border region encompasses a wide range of ecosystems, topography, dense urban areas, and agricultural developments that coexist in a limited geographic area and create numerous humananimal-environmental interfaces. The region is recognized for its high biodiversity, the presence of over 85 endangered plant and animal species, its importance on the Pacific migratory pathway, high levels of population mobility, and hosts the busiest international border in the world. These interfaces pose a significant risk to animal, human, and environmental health, as evidenced by frequent wildlife die offs, antibiotic resistant bacteria in streams, beach closures due to fecal contamination, pesticide toxicities, zoonotic infectious disease outbreaks, and vector borne diseases. In the marked absence of any organization comprehensively addressing the health risks posed by these complex interfaces and recognizing that these issues necessitate a binational, cross-sectoral One Health approach, the Early Warning Infectious Disease Surveillance Program (EWIDS) founded One Border One Health (OBOH) in 2011. OBOH recognizes that early warning systems should systematically monitor animal, human, and environmental health and that early detection is key to control. Hence OBOH’s primary aim is to create and integrate early warning surveillance systems that gather data from disparate sources in order to protect and improve animal, human, and environmental health. This information can be used to inform decision makers about important public health events in the CA/BC border region.

Objective:

To showcase One Border One Health, a binational, multidisciplinary initiative in the California/Baja California (CA/BC) border region whose aim is to reconfigure traditional species-specific approaches to surveillance for emerging and re-emerging pathogens.

 

Submitted by Magou on

In January 2016, the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA), serving 24 Member States(MS), began executing a regional Tourism and Health program (THP), recognizing that the health of Caribbean economies is closely related to the health of its tourism industry since the Caribbean is most tourism-dependent region in the world; that tourism is vulnerable to health, safety and environmental (HSE) threats; and that travel and tourism impacted on global health security. High and increasing visitors to the Caribbean can increase the health, safety and security risks by the introduction and spread of diseases, by both residents and visitors. This was exemplified by the H1N1 pandemic (2009), Chikungunya (2013), and the recent Zika epidemic. However, even though more people visit the Caribbean than reside, there is no regional visitor/tourism surveillance system. There is also no regional mandate and policy for the reporting of visitor/tourism illnesses. This coupled with inadequate training, lack of standards and collaboration between tourism health stakeholders have contributed to disease spread. The THP is an innovative, multifaceted, integrated, regional program with components of a web based real time Tourism and Health Information Surveillance and Response system (THiS), food safety and environmental sanitation training, standards and multisectoral health and tourism partnerships. It aims to promote the health, safety and security of Caribbean visitors and residents. The THP is novel in that it involves the implementation of a non- traditional, health information and surveillance system (visitor based illnesses), new data users (private sector, hotels, passenger ships, visitors), new partners (tourism sector) and at regional level. Given the novelty and the multisectoral nature of the THP, a critical factor to support its implementation and sustainability was the development of regional mandate and policy to facilitate real time surveillance and response to detect and reduce the spread of illness.

Objective:

The Regional Tourism and Health program (THP) is a novel program, comprising of a tourism surveillance system, training, standards and multisectoral partnerships. The objective was to develop regional mandate and policy to support this new program and its non-traditional surveillance system.

Submitted by elamb on

Nigeria is one of the three countries in the world with ongoing wild poliovirus (WPV) transmission, alongside Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nigeria also experiences outbreaks of circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2). Following the detection of WPV1 in northern Nigeria in 2016, after more than two years without WPV transmission, the country continues to implement an emergency response to the detected WPV1 and cVDPV2 strains. This resurgence of polio cases underscores the risk posee by low-level undetected transmission and the need to strengthen subnational surveillance. High quality acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) surveillance is essential to rapidly detect and respond to on-going polio transmission.

Objective:

We evaluated the Ebonyi state AFP surveillance system to assess its usefulness, performance and key system attributes.

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on

The international Society for Disease Surveillance has successfully brought together practitioners and researchers to share tools, ideas, and strategies to strengthen health surveillance systems. The Society has evolved from an initial focus on syndromic surveillance to a broader consideration of innovation in health surveillance. More recently, ISDS has also worked to support surveillance research and practice in International resource-constrained settings. Individuals who work in surveillance in developed countries outside the USA, however, have received little direct attention from ISDS. The policy and practice contexts in these countries are often quite different than the USA, so there is a need to support surveillance innovation in these countries in a manner that fits the context. Canadian surveillance practitioners and researchers comprise the largest International group of ISDS members, and these members have expressed an interest in working with ISDS to translate surveillance innovations into practice in Canada, where a national surveillance network and forum is lacking. This Round Table will consider how ISDS can help to support members in countries like Canada and will identify next steps for promoting the science and practice of disease surveillance in the Canadian context.

Objective

1) To explore how ISDS can better support researchers and public health practitioners working in the field of disease surveillance outside the United States;

and

2) To identify current surveillance issues in the Canadian public health system where ISDS can support dialogue and action.

 

Submitted by Magou on

Practice Fusion is a web-based electronic health record system with over 150,000 medical professional users treating over 50 million patients. The company focuses on small, ambulatory practices and is predominately comprised of practices in the field of primary care. The user base makes it an ideal system for public health surveillance. The Research Division has undertaken pilot projects to demonstrate the viability of using the data for surveillance for acute diseases, like influenza-like illness, chronic diseases, like diabetes, and risk factors, like hypertension.

Objective

This showcase aims to demonstrate the viability of Practice Fusion’s web-based electronic health record system for national surveillance. Practice Fusion also wishes to provide aggregate data to public health departments for surveillance for free. This showcase also hopes to engage those potential partners around uses of the company’s research database.

 

Submitted by Magou on

Disease surveillance systems remain the best quality systems to rely on when standardized surveillance systems provide the best data to understand disease occurrence and trends. The United States National Tuberculosis Surveillance System (NTSS) contains reported tuberculosis (TB) cases provided by all 50 states, the District of Columbia (DC), New York City, Puerto Rico, and other U.S.-affiliated jurisdictions in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea. However, the NTSS currently captures phenotypic drug susceptibility testing (DST) data and does not have the ability to collect the rapid molecular DST data generated by platforms such as Cepheid GeneXpert MTB/RIF, Hain MTBDRplus and MTBDRsl, Pyrosequencing, and Whole Genome Sequencing. Moreover, the information exchanges within the NTSS (represented in HL7 v2.5.1) are missing critical segments for appropriately representing laboratory test results and data on microbiological specimens.

Objective:

The objective of this presentation is to use a congruence of standardization protocols to effectively ensure that the quality of the data elements and exchange formats within the NTSS are optimal for users of the system.

Submitted by elamb on

In recent years, individuals have been using social network sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit to discuss health-related topics. These social media platforms consequently became new avenues for research and applications for researchers, for instance disease surveillance. Reddit, in particular, can potentially provide more in-depth contextual insights compared to Twitter, and Reddit members discuss potentially more diverse topics than Facebook members. However, identifying relevant discussions remains a challenge in large datasets like Reddit. Thus, much previous research using Reddit data focused on selected few topically-oriented sub-communities. Although such approach allows for topically focused datasets, a large portion of related data can be missed. In this research, we examine all sub-communities in which members are discussing e-cigarettes in order to determine if investigating these other sub-communities could result in a better smoking surveillance system.

Objective:

We aim to explore how to effectively leverage social media for vaping electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) surveillance. This study examines how members of a social media platform called Reddit utilize topically-oriented sub-communities for e-cigarette discussions.

Submitted by elamb on

Nearly 100 people per day die from opioid overdose in the United States. Further, prescription opioid abuse is assumed to be responsible for a 15-year increase in opioid overdose deaths. However, with increasing use of social media comes increasing opportunity to seek and share information. For instance, 80% of Internet users obtain health information online, including popular social interaction sites like Reddit (http://www.reddit.com), which had more than 82.5 billion page views in 20153. In Reddit, members often share information, and include URLs to supplement the information. Understanding the frequency of URL sharing and types of shared URLs can improve our knowledge of information seeking/sharing behaviors as well as domains of shared information on social media. Such knowledge has the potential to provide opportunities to improve public health surveillance practice. We use Reddit to track opioid related discussions and then investigate types of shared URLs among Reddit members in those discussions.

Objective:

We aim to understand (1) the frequency of URL sharing and (2) types of shared URLs among opioid related discussions that take place in the social media platform called Reddit.

Submitted by elamb on

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency Chemical and Biological Technologies Directorate (DTRA CB) has initiated the Biosurveillance Ecosystem (BSVE) research and development program. Work process flow diagrams, with associated explanations and historical examples, were developed based on in-person, structured interviews with public health and preventative medicine analysts from a variety of Department of Defense (DoD) organizations, and with one organization in the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and with a major U.S. city health department. The particular nuanced job characteristics of each organization were documented and subsequently validated with the individual analysts. Additionally, the commonalities across different organizations were described in meta-workflow diagrams and descriptions.

Objective

Operational biosurveillance capability gaps were analyzed and the required characteristics of new technology were outlined, the results of which will be described in this contribution.

Submitted by uysz on

Michigan has been collecting chief complaint data from emergency departments statewide to support situational awareness activities related to communicable disease since 2004. We validated the syndromic system by comparing the chief complaint data to the electronic medical records of a tertiary hospital in southeast Michigan to better understand the utility of the system for noncommunicable disease situations.

Objective

Validation of the syndromic system by comparing the chief complaint data to the electronic medical records (EMR) of a tertiary hospital.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on
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