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Article: Real-time surveillance for respiratory disease outbreaks, Ontario, Canada.(DISPATCHES)
- Article from:
- Emerging Infectious Diseases
- Article date:
- May 1, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 U.S. National Center for Infectious Diseases. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The threat of emerging infectious diseases, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome and pandemic influenza, makes early detection of health events critical for effective control and intervention of such outbreaks. By using alternative, electronic data sources (1), real-time syndromic surveillance systems have the potential to detect outbreaks of respiratory disease before conventional diagnosis- and laboratory-based surveillance identifies them. Many of these alternative data, such as sales of over-the-counter drugs, telephone health hotlines, and emergency department (ED) triage data, already are routinely collected.
ED syndromic surveillance typically uses a ...