Abstract
The speed with which disease outbreaks are recognized is critical for establishing effective control efforts. We evaluate global improvements in the timeliness of outbreak discovery and communication during 2010-2014 as a follow-up to a 2010 report. For all outbreaks reported by the World Health Organization's Disease Outbreak News, we estimate the number of days from first symptoms until outbreak discovery and until first public communication. We report median discovery and communication delays overall, by region, and by Human Development Index (HDI) quartile. We use Cox proportional hazards regression to assess changes in these 2 outcomes over time, along with Loess curves for visualization. Improvement since 1996 was greatest in the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Pacific regions and in countries in the middle HDI quartiles. However, little progress has occurred since 2010. Further improvements in surveillance will likely require additional international collaboration with a focus on regions of low or unstable HDI.
Highlights
The speed with which disease outbreaks are recognized is critical for establishing effective control efforts
The time from the start of an epidemic until its discovery improved by an average of 7.3% per year, and the time to public communication about the epidemic improved by 6.2% per year [13]
Our objective was to evaluate the trends in disease surveillance in recent years, building on methods established in the earlier work, to assess whether timeliness of outbreak e1
Summary
The speed with which disease outbreaks are recognized is critical for establishing effective control efforts. For all outbreaks reported by the World Health Organization’s Disease Outbreak News, we estimate the number of days from first symptoms until outbreak discovery and until first public communication. In 2010, Chen et al published a report estimating time from outbreak start to discovery and public communication across the world [13]. The report by Chen et al found a significant improvement in timeliness of surveillance for outbreaks around the world during 1996–2009 [13]. Median times from outbreak start to discovery and public communication were 23 and 32 days, respectively. The time from the start of an epidemic until its discovery improved by an average of 7.3% per year, and the time to public communication about the epidemic improved by 6.2% per year [13]
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