Innovations in surveillance of zoonotic disease

Abstract

Over the past fifteen years, Internet technology has significantly changed the landscape of public health surveillance and epidemic intelligence gathering. Disease and outbreak data is disseminated not only through formal online announcements by government agencies, but also through informal channels such as social networking sites, blogs, chat rooms, Web searches, local news media and crowdsourcing platforms. These data streams have been credited with decreasing the time between an outbreak and formal recognition of an outbreak, allowing for an expedited response to the public health threat. Collectively, these online sources create an image of global public health that is fundamentally different from the one produced by traditional public health surveillance infrastructure. Importantly these new tools now represent an emerging platform for zoonotic disease surveillance. This capacity has been illustrated most recently in China, where a hospital employee uploaded an image of an H7N9 patient's medical record to Sina Weibo -- a popular Chinese social network similar to Twitter. The post was promptly deleted, but appears to have accelerated government acknowledgement of four new cases. The emergence of H7N9 also represents an opportunity to promote the One Health narrative. Engagement of the Twitter community through the use of the #OneHealth hashtag during the most intense period of the outbreak would have been a highly visible way to raise awareness and potentially provide real-time surveillance information. Dr. Brownstein will discuss the current capabilities and future directions in the use of the non-traditional data sources for the purposes of public health surveillance and rapid detection of emerging zoonotic infectious diseases.