GeoSentinel - A surveillance network of returning travelers and migrants

Abstract

GeoSentinel is an emerging infectious disease network created as a joint project between the International Society of Travel Medicine (ISTM) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). GeoSentinel has several major objectives including conducting surveillance for emerging infectious diseases; rapidly sharing novel data on emerging infections with participating sites, internet information services (e.g. ProMED), and public health authorities (e.g. CDC, ECDC, Public Health Agency of Canada); and analyzing, presenting, and publishing surveillance results collaboratively with CDC, GeoSentinel sites, and GeoSentinel's two regional subnetworks, CanTravNet and EuroTravNet. The GeoSentinel surveillance network provides robust data that defines the spectrum of illness and its relation to place of exposure for significant health risks facing travelers and migrants. There are currently 70 GeoSentinel sites in 30 countries and 210 Affiliate Members with a presence on every continent except Antarctica. The GeoSentinel database now contains nearly 300,000 patient records; these include 54% post-travel visits, 31% seen during travel, and 15% migrants. GeoSentinel has successfully identified new outbreaks over the last two decades including leptospirosis in participants in the Borneo Ecochallenge (2000), sarcocystis in travelers to Tionan Island, Malaysia (2010), an outbreak of dengue fever in Angola (2013), schistosomiasis in vacationers in Corsica (2014), and sentinel cases of Zika virus disease in Costa Rica (2016), Vietnam (2016), and several other destinations in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific in recent years. GeoSentinel has also characterized the risk for travelers to countries where major sporting events were planned such as the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil. In summary, GeoSentinel is a vibrant global surveillance system that has made important contributions to the identification of disease outbreaks and trends in infectious disease epidemiology among travelers and migrants. In addition, GeoSentinel has the potential, through the development of a biobank of clinical samples, to collaborate with high level laboratories in academia and government to identify new pathogens responsible for respiratory, gastrointestinal, and systemic infections. GeoSentinel translates clinical and epidemiological data into meaningful evidence that is of critical importance to the containment of the global spread of infection.