Disease Surveillance

This report on polio eradication encourages effective monitoring and accurate disease surveillance to improve the quality of health services and disease control and eradication initiatives. The information and tools in the report evolved from actual use during National Immunization Days (NIDs) and from field assessments in several African countries. While most of the materials were developed for polio eradication, the concepts and tools also apply to routine health services. National and district Ministry of Health program managers can use the report as a reference guide to monitor and supervise their country programs. For field staff and managers, the report is a valuable reference tool for planning country activities. The report's five sections include (1) a process that can be used to monitor services during NIDs, including a comprehensive list of indicators; (2) instructions for developing effective supervision checklists to assess the quality of performance during NIDs; (3...

Geographical Information System (GIS) is a computer system that displays stored digital data developed over the last decade. GIS is a platform consisting of hardware, software, data and people and encompasses a fundamental and universally applicable set of value-added tools for input, transforming, data management and storage, analyzing, and output information that are geographically referenced. GIS can be applied to different veterinary activities. It can help to understand and explain the dynamics and spreading pattern of a disease and increase the speed of response in the case of a disease emergency. In an outbreak of a disease it could make the management of the situation easier, and it could also provide a tool to evaluate different strategies to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. The following areas in which GIS and special GIS-functions could be incorporated are presented: surveillance and monitoring of animal diseases, recording and reporting information, epidemic emergency, modeling disease spread, and planning control strategies. The technology has many features which make it ideal for use in animal disease control, including the ability to store information relating to demographic and causal
factors and disease incidence on a geographical background, and a variety of spatial analysis functions.

Health monitoring and disease surveillance systems can benefit from the integration of multiple data sources and semantic web technologies. The development and management of exposure histories is one particular area that requires integration of data from multiple sources. Exposure histories capture the spatial and temporal dimensions of possible disease exposure events and convey the dynamic factors within individuals' environments. Data sources for an exposure history might include numerous governmental, institutional and community records which document people's relationships with various locations. Existing monitoring networks and new wireless sensor networks also provide data on toxic agents in the environment. This paper describes the development of an ontology for a personal exposure history (PEH) that specifies explicit relationships between persons and locations and locations and putative environmental toxic agents. These relationships provide a foundation for maki...

Nearly 25 years after the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) effective control of the AIDS pandemic remains elusive. At the root of this challenge is the evolution of this virus to elude immune control. Error-prone nature of replication and retro-transcription is the hallmark of this virus. This fidelity of replication in HIV-1 is due to the absence of proof-reading/repair and post-replicative error correction mechanisms that normally operate during replication of DNA viruses. Advances in sequencing technology and expanded disease surveillance have allowed researchers to characterize the variation in HIV-1 around the world and within individual patient overtime. Although HIV-1 has been classified into distinct subtypes, the classification does not reflect dynamic genetic evolution of HIV-1 through which new strains are constantly emerging. The resultant viral diversity has implications for differential rates of disease progression in different geographical ...

In 2001, there were 997 cases of tuberculosis (TB) reported to the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System, of which, 967 were new cases of TB and 30 cases were relapses. The incidence rate of TB in Australia in 2001 was 5.1 cases per 100,000 population. The highest incidence of TB was reported in people born overseas (19.3 cases per 100,000 population), followed by Indigenous Australians (9.8 cases per 100,000 population). In contrast, the incidence rate of TB in the non-Indigenous Australian-born population was 1.0 cases per 100,000 population. This pattern of TB incidence rates amongst the sub-populations of Australia has been observed for over 10 years. Eighty-six per cent of TB cases completed treatment in 2001. Treatment was unsuccessful in 7 cases and only 22 cases defaulted. The National Tuberculosis Advisory Committee has published a National Strategic Plan with performance indicators to ensure that this enviable record of TB control is maintained and improved.

Modern biosurveillance relies on multiple sources of both prediagnostic and diagnostic data, updated daily, to discover disease outbreaks. Intrinsic to this effort are two assumptions: (1) the data being analyzed contain early indicators of a disease outbreak and (2) the outbreaks to be detected are not known a priori. However, in addition to outbreak indicators, syndromic data streams include such factors as day-of-week effects, seasonal effects, autocorrelation, and global trends. These explainable factors obscure unexplained outbreak events, and their presence in the data violates standard control-chart assumptions. Monitoring tools such as Shewhart, cumulative sum, and exponentially weighted moving average control charts will alert based largely on these explainable factors instead of on outbreaks. The goal of this paper is 2-fold: first, to describe a set of tools for identifying explainable patterns such as temporal dependence and, second, to survey and examine several data pr...

Emergence of African Swine Fever in Madagascar" : African Swine Fever (ASF) was diagnosed for the first time in Madagascar in 1998. ASF has apparently been introduced from the African continent to the southern part of the island with a subsequent spread to other regions except for areas in the north and in the west. The epidemic has had severe economic consequences for the home market of pork meat production. This article reviews the course of the epidemic with particular emphasis on the vectors involved in the transmission of the virus, such as the soft tick, Ornithodoros moubata porcinus. Presence of this vector and of the bushpig, Potamochoerus larvatus, as a potential wild reservoir, are some of the major obstacles in control of ASF in Madagascar. A veterinary disease surveillance system has to be

In 2005, 60 diseases and conditions were nationally notifiable in Australia. States and territories reported a total of 125,461 cases of communicable diseases to the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System: an increase of 10% on the number of notifications in 2004. In 2005, the most frequently notified diseases were sexually transmissible infections (51,557 notifications, 41% of total notifications), gastrointestinal diseases (29,422 notifications, 23%) and bloodborne diseases (19,278 notifications, 15%). There were 17,753 notifications of vaccine preventable diseases; 4,935 notifications of vectorborne diseases; 1,826 notification of other bacterial infections (legionellosis, leprosy, meningococcal infections and tuberculosis) and 687 notifications of zoonotic diseases.