OBJECTIVE: to evaluate the Brazilian Laboratorial Environment Management System (GAL) as a data source for the Sentinel Surveillance of Influenza-Like Illness (SSILI). METHODS: this is an evaluation study of GAL, through the analysis of its simplicity, flexibility, data quality, acceptability, representativeness, timeliness, stability and usefulness for SSILI, based on the guide for system ev...

BACKGROUND Detecting novel healthcare-associated infections (HCAI) as early as possible is an important public health priority. However, there is currently no evidence base to guide the design of efficient and reliable surveillance systems. Here we address this issue in the context of a novel pathogen spreading primarily between hospitals through the movement of patients. METHODS Using a math...

It is important to assess the suitability of sentinel sites for human disease; however, there have been few publications documenting the process of formal evaluation. We describe an approach to examining the representativeness of a single sentinel site employed for campylobacteriosis surveillance and source attribution, utilizing a selection of data sources and statistical comparisons of demogr...

Laboratory-supported influenza surveillance is important as part of pandemic preparedness, for identifying and isolating candidate vaccine strains, for supporting trials of anti-influenza drugs and for refining the influenza surveillance case definition in practice. This study describes the implementation of laboratory-supported influenza surveillance in Victorian sentinel general practices and...

BACKGROUND Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is an important pathogen that can cause severe illness in infants and young children. In this study, we assessed whether data on RSV collected by the European Influenza Surveillance Scheme (EISS) could be used to build an RSV surveillance system in Europe. METHODS Influenza and RSV data for the 2002-2003 winter season were analysed for England, Fra...

The problem of optimizing sentinel surveillance in networks is to find the nodes where an emerging disease outbreak can be discovered early or reliably. Whether the emphasis should be on early or reliable detection depends on the scenario in question. We investigate three objective measures quantifying the performance of nodes in sentinel surveillance—the time to detection or extinction, the ti...

Methods As part of a large community study, subjects older than 2 years reporting at least two symptoms of influenzalike-illness were recruited from 30 outpatient clinics in Hong Kong prospectively from February 2007 to July 2010 around the influenza seasons [1,2]. Each subject provided a pooled pair of nose and throat swabs to be tested by the QuickVue rapid test on site. Overall test positive...

We compared a municipal sentinel surveillance system for influenza with the Microbial Isolation Surveillance System (MISS) in Kyoto City, Japan. Sensitivity, specificity, and predictive value positive (PVP) of the Influenza Sentinel Surveillance System (ISSS) compared to the MISS were calculated by influenza season and by month. Sensitivity ranged from 80 to 97%, specificity ranged from 55 to 7...