PROBLEM The revision of the International Health Regulations (IHR) and the threat of influenza pandemics and other disease outbreaks with a major impact on developing countries have prompted bolstered surveillance capacity, particularly in low-resource settings. APPROACH Surveillance tools with well-timed, validated data are necessary to strengthen disease surveillance. In 2007 Madagascar imp...

INTRODUCTION In recent years, many syndromic surveillance systems have been deployed around the United States for the early detection of biologic terrorism-related and naturally occurring outbreaks. These systems and the associated aberration detection methods need to be evaluated. OBJECTIVE This study evaluated several detection methods of the Early Aberration Reporting System (EARS) under s...

Introduction Oregon Public Health Division (OPHD), in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, implemented Oregon ESSENCE in 2012. Oregon ESSENCE is an automated, electronic syndromic surveillance system that captures emergency department data. To strengthen the capabilities of Oregon ESSENCE, OPHD sought other sources of health-outcome information, including ...

OBJECTIVE To ascertain if monitoring over-the-counter (OTC) drug sales could provide a timely syndromic surveillance method of detecting outbreaks of gastrointestinal illness. METHOD This study evaluated the potential of a syndromic surveillance system by comparing retrospective pharmacy OTC sales of anti-nauseants and anti-diarrheals to emergency room visits and case numbers from two Canadia...

Introduction Lack of access to regular dental care often results in costly, oral health visits to EDs that could otherwise have been prevented or managed by a dentist (1). Most studies on oral health-related visits to EDs have used a wide range of classifications from different databases, but none have used syndromic surveillance data. The volume, frequency, and included details of syndromic da...

We identified 15 different syndromic surveillance systems currently in use. From these, we found 8 different case definitions for acute respiratory illness due to intentional release of biological weapons. All 15 surveillance approaches we identified used different criteria for enumerating and tallying illness syndromes attributable to biological illness, (Table 1) with little or no evidence of...

1Medicine, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; 2University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom; 3Centre for Infections, Health Protection Agency, London, United Kingdom; 4Health Protection Agency Syndromic Surveillance Team, Birmingham, United Kingdom; 5Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London, United Kingdom; 6Royal College of General Practitioners Research and Surveillan...

Introduction From 2001-2011, mental health-related hospitalizations and ED visits increased among United States children nationwide [1]. During this period, mental health-related hospitalizations among NYC children increased nearly 23% [2]. To estimate mental health-related ED visits in NYC and assess the use of syndromic surveillance chief complaint data to monitor these visits, we compared tr...

BACKGROUND School absenteeism is a common source of data used in syndromic surveillance, which can eventually be used for early outbreak detection. However, the absenteeism reporting system in most schools, especially in developing countries, relies on a paper-based method that limits its use for disease surveillance or outbreak detection. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to develop ...