Title |
Public health for the people: participatory infectious disease surveillance in the digital age
|
---|---|
Published in |
Emerging Themes in Epidemiology, June 2014
|
DOI | 10.1186/1742-7622-11-7 |
Pubmed ID | |
Authors |
Oktawia P Wójcik, John S Brownstein, Rumi Chunara, Michael A Johansson |
Abstract |
The 21(st) century has seen the rise of Internet-based participatory surveillance systems for infectious diseases. These systems capture voluntarily submitted symptom data from the general public and can aggregate and communicate that data in near real-time. We reviewed participatory surveillance systems currently running in 13 different countries. These systems have a growing evidence base showing a high degree of accuracy and increased sensitivity and timeliness relative to traditional healthcare-based systems. They have also proven useful for assessing risk factors, vaccine effectiveness, and patterns of healthcare utilization while being less expensive, more flexible, and more scalable than traditional systems. Nonetheless, they present important challenges including biases associated with the population that chooses to participate, difficulty in adjusting for confounders, and limited specificity because of reliance only on syndromic definitions of disease limits. Overall, participatory disease surveillance data provides unique disease information that is not available through traditional surveillance sources. |
X Demographics
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
United States | 8 | 33% |
United Kingdom | 2 | 8% |
Spain | 2 | 8% |
India | 1 | 4% |
Colombia | 1 | 4% |
Netherlands | 1 | 4% |
Sweden | 1 | 4% |
Unknown | 8 | 33% |
Demographic breakdown
Type | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Members of the public | 15 | 63% |
Scientists | 6 | 25% |
Practitioners (doctors, other healthcare professionals) | 3 | 13% |
Mendeley readers
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Switzerland | 1 | <1% |
Australia | 1 | <1% |
Brazil | 1 | <1% |
India | 1 | <1% |
Saudi Arabia | 1 | <1% |
Unknown | 148 | 97% |
Demographic breakdown
Readers by professional status | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Student > Ph. D. Student | 29 | 19% |
Student > Master | 28 | 18% |
Researcher | 27 | 18% |
Student > Bachelor | 11 | 7% |
Student > Postgraduate | 7 | 5% |
Other | 24 | 16% |
Unknown | 27 | 18% |
Readers by discipline | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Medicine and Dentistry | 42 | 27% |
Computer Science | 15 | 10% |
Social Sciences | 14 | 9% |
Agricultural and Biological Sciences | 12 | 8% |
Veterinary Science and Veterinary Medicine | 6 | 4% |
Other | 34 | 22% |
Unknown | 30 | 20% |