UNLABELLED BACKGROUND The World Health Organization (WHO) collects and publishes surveillance data and statistics for select diseases, but traditional methods of gathering such data are time and labor intensive. Event-based biosurveillance, which utilizes a variety of Internet sources, complements traditional surveillance. In this study we assess the reliability of Internet biosurveillance a...

1PAHO, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; 2London School of Economics, London, United Kingdom; 3School of Business and Economics, Loughborough, United Kingdom; 4John Hopkins APL, Laurel, MD, USA; 5University of Florida, Tallahassee, FL, USA; 6Veterinary Public Health Inst., Bern, Switzerland; 7University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA; 8Boston Public Health Comm., Boston, MA, USA; 9University of Minnesot...

Outbreak detection systems for use with very large multiple surveillance databases must be suited both to the data available and to the requirements of full automation. To inform the development of more effective outbreak detection algorithms, we analyzed 20 years of data (1991-2011) from a large laboratory surveillance database used for outbreak detection in England and Wales. The data relate ...

The Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System (AFHSC-GEIS) has the mission of performing surveillance for emerging infectious diseases that could affect the United States (U.S.) military. This mission is accomplished by orchestrating a global portfolio of surveillance projects, capacity-building efforts, outbreak investigations and trai...

Introduction The National Collaborative for Bio-Preparedness (NCB-Prepared) was established in 2010 to create a biosurveillance resource to enhance situational awareness and emergency preparedness. This jointinstitutional effort has drawn on expertise from the University of North CarolinaChapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and SAS Institute, leveraging North Carolina’s role as a leade...

The primary aim of this review was to evaluate the state of knowledge of the geographical distribution of all infectious diseases of clinical significance to humans. A systematic review was conducted to enumerate cartographic progress, with respect to the data available for mapping and the methods currently applied. The results helped define the minimum information requirements for mapping infe...

There are some existing evaluation methods, such as the AMOC curve [1], which focus on evaluating the timeliness of alerting algorithms. As the AMOC curve is typically applied in biosurveillance, it plots the expected time to computer-based detection (since the outbreak began) as a function of the false alert rate. In an EWT curve, we add a clinician model and plot the expected time that an alg...

Two epidemic waves of an avian influenza A (H7N9) virus have so far affected China. Most human cases have been attributable to poultry exposure at live-poultry markets, where most positive isolates were sampled. The potential geographic extent of potential re-emerging epidemics is unknown, as are the factors associated with it. Using newly assembled data sets of the locations of 8,943 live-poul...