ASPREN1⁄4Australian Sentinel Practices Research Network; ILI1⁄4 influenza-like illness; SPNWA1⁄4Sentinel Practitioners Network of Western Australia; VicSPIN1⁄4Victorian Sentinel Practice Influenza Network. * For ASPREN and VicSPIN: overall proportions of positive swabs collected during the influenza season (MayeOctober). u MAustralia depicted a severe influenza season, focusing on the record nu...

Google Flu Trends (http://www.google.org/flutrends/) (GFT) aggregates Google search data to estimate flu activity in 28 countries. This study explored the correlation of GFT with Japanese national sentinel surveillance data in 2009. We obtained GFT and national sentinel surveillance data for influenza in all 47 Japanese prefectures from 29 June– 31 Dec 2009. Pearson correlation coefficients wer...

In this report we describe a new approach in HIV sentinel surveillance that was piloted in Viet Nam in 2009 and is currently being rolled out in all provinces. It comprises a brief behavioural questionnaire added to the HIV sentinel surveillance surveys conducted routinely among people who inject drugs, female sex workers and men who have sex with men. Timely reporting of data from this system ...

A multivariate time-series regression model was developed in order to describe the 2005-2008 age-specific time-course of varicella sentinel surveillance data following the introduction of a varicella childhood vaccination programme in Germany. This ecological approach allows the assessment of vaccine effectiveness under field conditions by relating vaccine coverage in cohorts of 24-month-old ch...

We conducted a test-negative case-control study based in five European sentinel surveillance networks. The early 2012/13 adjusted influenza vaccine effectiveness was 78.2% (95% CI: 18.0 to 94.2) against influenza B, 62.1% (95% CI: -22.9 to 88.3%) against A(H1) pdm09, 41.9 (95% CI: -67.1 to 79.8) against A(H3N2) and 50.4% (95% CI: -20.7 to 79.6) against all influenza types in the target groups f...

BACKGROUND We assessed the impact of two major modifications of the Dutch National Influenza Prevention Programme--the introduction in 1997 of free-of-charge vaccination to persons aged ≥65 years and to high-risk groups (previously only advised, and not free of charge), and the lowering of the eligible age to 60 years in 2008--on the estimated incidence of influenza infection leading to influen...

BACKGROUND Knowing the national disease burden of severe influenza in low-income countries can inform policy decisions around influenza treatment and prevention. We present a novel methodology using locally generated data for estimating this burden. METHODS AND FINDINGS This method begins with calculating the hospitalized severe acute respiratory illness (SARI) incidence for children <5 years...

BACKGROUND Due to a lack of survey of health care seeking behavior for influenza, the actual magnitude of influenza in Beijing of China has not been well described. METHODS During 2013-2014 influenza season, two cross-sectional household surveys were carried out respectively during the epidemic and non-epidemic season of influenza. A structured survey was undertaken with individuals who were ...

Objective To characterise the complete case series of influenza A/H7N9 infections as of 27 May 2013, detected by China’s national sentinel surveillance system for influenza-like illness.

OBJECTIVES To monitor and analyse trends in HIV-1 seroprevalence among antenatal women in Nairobi, Kenya. DESIGN Six sequential surveys were carried out among antenatal clinic attenders at four Nairobi City Council health centres between November 1991 and April 1997. METHODS A total of 6828 women attending for first antenatal clinic visit were administered a standard questionnaire to obtain...