Abstract
The Health Protection Agency (HPA) (currently Public Health England) implemented the Health Protection Event-Based Surveillance (EBS) to provide additional national epidemic intelligence for the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games (the Games). We describe EBS and evaluate the system attributes. EBS aimed at identifying, assessing and reporting to the HPA Olympic Coordination Centre (OCC) possible national infectious disease threats that may significantly impact the Games. EBS reported events in England from 2 July to 12 September 2012. EBS sourced events from reports from local health protection units and from screening an electronic application 'HPZone Dashboard' (DB). During this period, 147 new events were reported to EBS, mostly food-borne and vaccine-preventable diseases: 79 from regional units, 144 from DB (76 from both). EBS reported 61 events to the OCC: 21 of these were reported onwards. EBS sensitivity was 95.2%; positive predictive value was 32.8%; reports were timely (median one day; 10th percentile: 0 days - same day; 90th percentile: 3.6 days); completeness was 99.7%; stability was 100%; EBS simplicity was assessed as good; the daily time per regional or national unit dedicated to EBS was approximately 4 hours (weekdays) and 3 hours (weekends). OCC directors judged EBS as efficient, fast and responsive. EBS provided reliable, reassuring, timely, simple and stable national epidemic intelligence for the Games.
Highlights
Between July and September 2012, the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games took place in London and in 10 other United Kingdom (UK) locations
Event-Based Surveillance (EBS) activities were conducted on a daily basis for 69 days between 2 July 2012 and 12 September 2012, apart from 7 to 8 July and 18 to 19 August when national Olympic surveillance activities were on an exception report-basis only
EBS was co-located with the Olympic Coordination Centre (OCC) based in Health Protection Agency (HPA) Victoria, London, and was staffed by a daily duty regional epidemiologist and either a scientist or a public health trainee
Summary
Between July and September 2012, the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games (the Games) took place in London and in 10 other United Kingdom (UK) locations. Inherent in the characteristics of such mass gathering (MG) events is the increased risk of communicable diseases (e.g. large number of visitors, highly concentrated and mobile population, increased pressure on infrastructure, mass catering) and, due to the high profile of the event, an increased risk of a bioterrorist threat [3,4,5,6]. Communicable diseases have not been a significant cause of health events during recent major sporting MGs [7,8], and those events that have occurred have often been of low risk and low consequence and have not impacted on the success of the event, the increased risk remains. EI sources information through traditional and routine indicatorbased components (centred on routine reporting of cases of disease) and other event-based components (i.e. unstructured data collection from screening of any kind of source)
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