Abstract
IntroductionWhile it is suspected that some ages were misreported during the 2014-2016 West African Ebola outbreak, an analysis examining age data quality has not been conducted. The study objective was to examine age heaping and terminal digit preference as indicators for quality of age data collected in the Sierra Leone Ebola Database (SLED).MethodsAge data quality for adult patients was analyzed within SLED for the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever (VHF) database and the laboratory testing dataset by calculating Whipple´s index and Myers´s blended index, stratified by sex and region.ResultsAge data quality was low in both the VHF database (Whipple´s index for the 5-year range, 229.2) and the laboratory testing dataset (Whipple´s index for the 5-year range, 236.4). Age was reported more accurately in the Western Area and least accurately in the Eastern Province. Age data for females were less accurate than for males.ConclusionAge data quality was low in adult patients during the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, which may reduce its use as an identifying or stratifying variable. These findings inform future analyses using this database and describe a phenomenon that has relevance in data collection methods and analyses for future outbreaks in developing countries.
Highlights
The West African Ebola outbreak in 2014-2016 resulted in over 28,000 cases and 11,000 deaths [1]
Our objective was to describe age heaping as an indicator for inaccurate age data collected during the Ebola virus disease outbreak in Sierra Leone, with the goal of informing future Sierra Leone Ebola Database (SLED) analyses and assessing implications for data management of other large-scale public health responses
Our analysis revealed significant age heaping in two essential databases from the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone
Summary
The West African Ebola outbreak in 2014-2016 resulted in over 28,000 cases and 11,000 deaths [1]. The resulting VHF database contains clinical information, such as symptoms and date of onset and demographic data reported by suspected case patients or their relatives and collected by case investigators [3]. While this database is often used for national and international level analyses because it provides the most comprehensive epidemiologic data on Ebola cases available in Sierra Leone, there were considerable difficulties encountered in ensuring consistency and completeness of the data [5]. The Sierra Leone MoHS, with assistance from the CDC, consolidated available records to form a more comprehensive and complete database, referred to as the Sierra Leone Ebola Database (SLED) [6]
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