Syndromic Surveillance in Public Health Practice, New York City

摘要

The New York City Department of Health and MentalHygiene has established a syndromic surveillance systemthat monitors emergency department visits to detect dis-ease outbreaks early. Routinely collected chief complaintinformation is transmitted electronically to the healthdepartment daily and analyzed for temporal and spatialaberrations. Respiratory, fever, diarrhea, and vomiting arethe key syndromes analyzed. Statistically significant aber-rations or "signals" are investigated to determine their pub-lic health importance. In the first year of operation(November 15, 2001, to November 14, 2002), 2.5 millionvisits were reported from 39 participating emergencydepartments, covering an estimated 75% of annual visits.Most signals for the respiratory and fever syndromes (64%and 95%, respectively) occurred during periods of peakinfluenza A and B activity. Eighty-three percent of the sig-nals for diarrhea and 88% of the signals for vomitingoccurred during periods of suspected norovirus androtavirus transmission