Communicable disease reporting fraught with variations.

Communicable Disease Reporting among Physicians: Knowledge, Attitudes, and Reporting Levels

Reporting of communicable diseases to local health departments by health-care providers and laboratories is fundamental to the prevention, control, and monitoring of diseases in the community. It is common knowledge among public health officials that communicable diseases are underreported by physicians; yet the extent to which this occurs is unknown. This study was implemented to determine com...

Is over-reporting a problem in mandatory communicable disease reporting? The Taiwanese experience on enterovirus 71.

INTRODUCTION In Taiwan, severe enteroviral infections must be reported to the government within 24 hours to ensure that severe enterovirus 71 (EV71) infections can be detected early. The objective of this research was to ascertain whether over-reporting is a problem in mandatory disease-reporting systems. METHODOLOGY A multiyear cross-sectional study methodology was applied based on secondary...

SPECIAL THEME: COMMUNICABLE DISEASE Back pain, a communicable disease?

Background Back pain (BP) is a frequent disorder affecting currently up to 40% of adults in Western Europe. Most of it is said to be ‘non-specific’, i.e. lacking an obvious patho-anatomical explanation. It is seldom the consequence of a contagious disease caused by microorganisms. This does not exclude it from being communicable if ‘communicable’ is to refer to something being transmitted by sh...

Physician and Infection Preventionists Perceptions on Communicable Disease Reporting—Indiana, 201

Leveraging public health's participation in a Health Information Exchange to improve communicable disease reporting

BACKGROUND Infectious diseases can appear and spread rapidly. Timely information about disease patterns and trends allows public health agencies to quickly investigate and efficiently contain those diseases. But disease case reporting to public health has traditionally been paper-based, resulting in somewhat slow, burdensome processes. Fortunately, the expanding use of electronic health records...