BACKGROUND In surveillance networks based on voluntary participation of health-care professionals, there is little choice regarding the selection of participants' characteristics. External information about participants, for example local physician density, can help reduce bias in incidence estimates reported by the surveillance network. METHODS There is an inverse association between the num...

Since the 1950s, sentinel surveillance networks with general practitioners (GPs) have been progressively implemented and involved in influenza surveillance, e.g. in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Portugal and Spain. Since 1988, several collaborative European studies with sentinel networks aimed at stimulating influenza surveillance all over Europe and harmonising the surveillance act...

BACKGROUND Sentinel surveillance for HIV among women attending antenatal clinics using unlinked anonymous testing is a cornerstone of HIV surveillance in sub-Saharan Africa. Increased use of routine antenatal HIV testing allows consideration of using these programmatic data rather than sentinel surveillance data for HIV surveillance. METHODS To gauge Kenya's readiness to discontinue sentinel ...

OBJECTIVE Describe the influenza A(H1N1) pandemic in Bhutan. DESIGN Observational study from sentinel surveillance sites. SETTING Bhutan remains isolated, with only one to two flights a day at the lone airport, no trains, and only three major roads that enter from India. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES PCR positive human respiratory samples. RESULTS The first case of A(H1N1)pdm09 infection was de...

We applied time-series methods to multivariate sentinel surveillance data recorded in Hong Kong during 1998-2007. Our study demonstrates that simultaneous monitoring of multiple streams of influenza surveillance data can improve the accuracy and timeliness of alerts compared with monitoring of aggregate data or of any single stream alone.

BACKGROUND The World Health Organization and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control have highlighted the importance of establishing systems to monitor severe influenza. Following the H1N1 (2009) influenza pandemic, a sentinel network of 23 Trusts, the UK Severe Influenza Surveillance System (USISS), was established to monitor hospitalisations due to confirmed seasonal influenza in E...

Influenza-like illness data are collected via an Influenza Sentinel Provider Surveillance Network at the state level. Because participation is voluntary, locations of the sentinel providers may not reflect optimal geographic placement. The purpose of this study was to determine the "best" locations for sentinel providers in Iowa by using a maximal coverage model (MCM) and to compare the populat...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is pursuing 3 distinct, complementary efforts focused on providing data for action, including facility-level use metrics for benchmarking across comparable patient care settings, national estimates of usage patterns using sentinel surveillance sites, and limited assessments using proprietary data.

From June 2009 through December 2009, Haiti conducted sentinel surveillance for influenza. 499 samples were collected and tested using real-time RT-PCR. 197 (39.5%) were positive for influenza, including 95 (48%) pandemic (H1N1) 2009, 57 (29%) seasonal influenza A and 45 (23%) influenza B. The median age of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 cases was 21.7; two-thirds of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 cases were in pa...

OBJECTIVE To compare HIV prevalence from antenatal surveillance to that of the demographic and health survey (DHS), and to identify factors determining the difference of HIV prevalence between women recruited in these two surveys in Rwanda in 2005. METHODS Comparative cross-sectional study of HIV prevalence and socio-demographic factors collected by the antenatal survey in 13,745 pregnant wom...