Abstract
Tanzania, like most East African countries, faces a great burden from the spread of preventable infectious childhood diseases. Diarrhea, acute respiratory infections (ARI), pneumonia, malnutrition, hepatitis, and measles are responsible for the majority of deaths amongst children aged 0-5 years. Infectious disease surveillance and response is the foundation of public healthcare practices, and it is increasingly being undertaken using information technology. Tanzania however, due to challenges in information technology infrastructure and public health resources, still relies on paper-based disease surveillance. Thus, only traditional clinical patient data is used. Nontraditional and pre-diagnostic infectious disease report case data are excluded. In this paper, the development of the Big Data Analytics Framework for Childhood Infectious Disease Surveillance and Response System is presented. The framework was designed to guide healthcare professionals to track, monitor, and analyze infectious disease report cases from sources such as social media for prevention and control of infectious diseases affecting children. The proposed framework was validated through use-cases scenario and performance-based comparison.
Highlights
In 2018, there were 5.3 million deaths of children under the age of 5 years around the world (World Health Organization report, 2020, Oct. 15) with most of the deaths taking place in the African region
We modified and existing big data for infectious disease surveillance framework to fit the identified needs and during validation, we found that the framework supported wide coverage of healthcare data collection from online data sets
The results in this study show that in the traditional system, three of the six hospitals (Mwananyamala, Mawenzi, and Mbeya) only clinical data were used for surveillance
Summary
In 2018, there were 5.3 million deaths of children under the age of 5 years around the world (World Health Organization report, 2020, Oct. 15) with most of the deaths taking place in the African region. According to WHO, a disease surveillance system “is the continuous, systematic collection, analysis and interpretation of healthcare-related data needed for the planning, implementation, and evaluation of public health practices”. It serves as an early warning and alert system for unforeseen public health emergencies, supports medical practitioners to prepare infectious disease spread report cases for intervention, track disease spread advancement, and provides crucial information to the epidemiologist, policy, and decision-makers. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the region with the highest under-5 mortality rate in the world with more than 80% of the 5.2 million under-five deaths in 2019 (WHO, 2019) This is the average of 1 child in 13 dying before his or her fifth birthday. These challenges have led to the need for new approaches and technologies for infectious disease alerts, detection, and immediate response
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