BACKGROUND In computer supported outbreak detection, a statistical method is applied to a collection of cases to detect any excess cases for a particular disease. Whether a detected aberration is a true outbreak is decided by a human expert. We present a technical framework designed and implemented at the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control for computer supported outbreak detection...

Rapid detection, reporting, and response to an infectious disease outbreak are critical to prevent localized health events from emerging as pandemic threats. Metrics to evaluate the timeliness of these critical activities, however, are lacking. Easily understood and comparable measures for tracking progress and encouraging investment in rapid detection, reporting, and response are sorely needed...

OBJECTIVE We developed a probabilistic model of how clinicians are expected to detect a disease outbreak due to an outdoor release of anthrax spores, when the clinicians only have access to traditional clinical information (e.g., no computer-based alerts). We used this model to estimate an upper bound on the amount of time expected for clinicians to detect such an outbreak. Such estimates may b...

BACKGROUND Detection of outbreaks is an important part of disease surveillance. Although many algorithms have been designed for detecting outbreaks, few have been specifically assessed against diseases that have distinct seasonal incidence patterns, such as those caused by vector-borne pathogens. METHODS We applied five previously reported outbreak detection algorithms to Ross River virus (RR...

OBJECTIVES Evaluate data available from a national voluntary reporting system and describe the data processing necessary to enable the development and application of outbreak detection methods in healthcare settings. METHODS Evaluation was performed on an extract of data reported between March 2007 and May 2012. Reporting delays were calculated and analysed at the trust, regional and national...

A recent outbreak of hand, foot, and mouth disease in Singapore in 2000 affected several thousand children and resulted in four deaths. The aim of this study was to determine the applicability of reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR) with universal pan-enterovirus primers and enterovirus 71 (EV71) type-specific primers for the direct detection of enteroviruses in clinical specimens derived from th...

This document gives an introduction to the R package surveillance containing tools for outbreak detection in routinely collected surveillance data. The package contains an implementation of the procedures described by Stroup et al. (1989), Farrington et al. (1996) and the system used at the Robert Koch Institute, Germany. For evaluation purposes, the package contains example data sets and funct...