Defining infections in international travellers through the GeoSentinel surveillance network

摘要

| The global distribution of GeoSentinel sites, shown as orange circles. | A schematic representation of the reporting structure of the GeoSentinel network. Data are collected at individual sites from patients with a travel-associated illness who present to a GeoSentinel clinic, and they are sent to the central database (which is maintained by the International Society of Travel Medicine (ISTM) at the CDC, Atlanta, USA) using a web-based reporting system. Quarterly reports are generated centrally, using collected data, and circulated back to GeoSentinel sites. Rare and alarming reports (such as avian influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and haemorrhagic fever) trigger a rapid query response that is sent to the reporting site for further clarification and to all sites to notify them of such an event. The data are also made available to GeoSentinel sites to conduct research but only following a stringent project application process. Finally, GeoSentinel provides reports based on travel-associated illness and events data collected through the network to third-party groups such as the Australian College of Tropical Medicine (TropMed), ISTM, the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED) and the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA). Part is modified, with permission, from © (2008) GeoSentinel.