Surveillance Systems

Ascariasis is one of the most common intestinal nematode infections caused by Ascaris lumbricoides, especially in the tropics and subtropics where warm, wet climates favor year-round transmission of infection. Humans become infected by ingesting infective ascaris eggs in contaminated food, water or from hands that have become faecally contaminated and can cause reduced physical fitness, growth retardation, and respiratory and gastrointestinal problems. The highest morbidity is found in children, especially in those with a high worm burden. To identify high risk areas for intervention, it is necessary to understand the effects of climatic, environmental and socio-demographic conditions on A. lumbricoides infection. In Sri Lanka, although ascariasis was the commonest intestinal parasitic infection among children, information about associated factors and current health impact is insufficient. Therefore, this study was designed to develop and pilot an Ascariasis surveillance system among children in Sri Lanka.

Objective

Designing, developing and Piloting an Ascariasis surveillance system of children to determine factors associated with their variations in Sri Lanka.

Before the launch of standard National Health Information System (NMHIS) in 2000, there had been acute paucity of reliable and timely health information in Pakistan. Health Departments had no choice than to resort to estimates or carry expensive community based surveys to determine the disease incidence. After the development and deployment of NHMIS, overall Health System is reshaping itself based upon the regular and frequent information now available on a good number number of priority health problems. This is system is now offering tremendous opportunities for promoting the cause of evidence based decision making and monitoring of its expanded health care structure. This effort had led to putting in place a standard system of data collection and transmission from roughly 13000 public health services (both urban and rural ). The new system is now able to promptly locate pockets of vulnerable communities reporting high disease incidence.

Objective

Purpose of this abstract is to show how launch of a standard National Health Information System is has become the main national data source, and is, playing a pivotal role in facilitating decision making in health care system in Pakistan.

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.

Recently signed in Denver, the Paris Declaration demonstrates a collective resolution to end AIDS by continually monitoring these goals. However siloed data and in/out migration results in poor capacity to track population level care indicators for persons living with HIV (PLWH). Surveillance should not only enumerate PLWH but also support prevention and care programming (1). We designed and implemented the HIV Data to Care Tool to describe the continuum, from case finding to HIV care. This study describes a system to combine data sources to inform local HIV surveillance, outreach, and care. Development objectives included targeted community and clinical interventions and evaluation, user defined reports to identify subpopulation disparities, and a persistent data visualization readily available to stakeholders.

Objective

To describe Denver Public Health’s model for designing a business intelligence (BI) tool for HIV surveillance and outreach and the impact after implementation.

Although national surveillance systems are maintained for human health (CDC) and for livestock disease (USDA); there is no network or data repository in the area of wildlife disease surveillance. Because emerging and re-emerging diseases severely affect wildlife populations, impact domestic and agricultural animals, and are a reservoir for zoonotic transmission, it is crucial to have early notification and recognition of disease patterns in wildlife populations. Due to fragmented systems of wildlife management, inconsistent investigation into sudden mortality events, and limited laboratory availability, there is not a single entity that is responsible for reporting disease events in North American wildlife populations.

Objective

The USGS National Wildlife Health Center in conjunction with federal, state, tribal partners proposed an event reporting system with current and historic information on wildlife morbidity and mortality events in North America. The vehicle to accomplish this goal is WHISPers, the Wildlife Health Information Sharing Partnership event reporting system. This system depicts laboratory confirmed wildlife mortality events using geospatial mapping capability. Data are collected by multiple partners to collectively enhance the understanding of disease in wildlife populations.

Infectious disease outbreaks during crises can be controlled by detecting epidemics at their earliest possible stages through cost effective and time efficient data analytical approaches. The slow or non reporting is a real gap in existing reporting systems that delays in receiving the disease alerts and outbreaks, and hence delays in response causing high burden of morbidity and mortality, especially during crises situation. As on contrary, the functioning electronic databases for fast and reliable disease early warning and response networks (EWARN) have been found very effective in early detection, confirmation and response to disease outbreaks but launching the implementation of such systems is always time consuming due to resource constraints and other limitations during crises. Hence introduction of time efficient data analytical approaches can serve as a fast and reliable alternative for electronic databases during the launching phases, and may facilitate assessment of epidemics and outbreak situation by ensuring immediate, reliable and fully functional disease reporting and analysis until online database becomes fully functional and adopted by authorities.

Objective

To assess the epidemic and outbreak situations during emergencies through development and application of a data summarization techniques while launching electronic disease early warning systems (eDEWS) in resource poor countries