Information gaps in surveillance data and effects on the Ghanaian response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa

摘要

The ability to curtail the spread of the 2014 Ebola virus disease (EVD) in Nigeria and Senegal was due to the strong health system structures which included identification of contacts, quarantine of suspected cases, monitoring, analysis and utilization of good quality data.~(5)~(,)~(6)Stata version12 was used to analyse the data. Each patient's records were checked and each variable checked for completeness. The code 999 was entered for blanks and was recoded as missing values before the analysis. A variable indicating the number of symptoms recorded for each patient was generated by recoding the symptoms for each patient. A variable (symptom) was generated for each symptoms (e.g. fever) for each individual with the value 1 if the response is either yes or no and 0 if the field is blank or don't know. Another variable or indicator (number symptoms) was then generated to contain the sum of the variable symptom for each individual. Descriptive statistics were computed on each of the variables to determine the proportion of missing values or blanks.