Innovative Communicable Disease Reporting

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...

Using Social Networking Sites for Communicable Disease Control: Innovative Contact Tracing or Breach of Confidentiality?

Social media applications such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have attained huge popularity, with more than three billion people and organizations predicted to have a social networking account by 2015. Social media offers a rapid avenue of communication with the public and has potential benefits for communicable disease control and surveillance. However, its application in everyday public hea...

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