In the 2015 dengue outbreak in Taiwan, 43,784 people were infected and 228 died, making it the nationâs largest outbreak ever. Facing the increasing threat of dengue, the integration of health information for prevention and control of outbreaks becomes very important. Based on past epidemics, the areas with higher incidence of dengue fever are located in southern Taiwan. Without a smart and integrated surveillance system, the information on case distribution, high risk areas, mosquito surveillance, flooding areas and so on is fragmented. The first-line public health workers need to check all this information through different systems manually. When outbreaks occurred, paper-based outbreak investigation forms had to be prepared and filled in by public health workers. Then, they needed to enter part of this information into Taiwan CDCâs system. Duplicated work occurred and cost lots of labor time during the epidemic period. Therefore, we choose one rural county, Pingtung County, with scarce financial resources, to set up a new dengue surveillance system.
Objective:
In this paper we designed one cross-platform surveillance system to assist dengue fever surveillance, outbreak investigation and risk management of dengue fever.