Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 10.7
Example of GIS for Chinese Infectious Disease Surveillance.
than 50,000 entry points for reporting exist nationwide, which has greatly
improved the timeliness and accuracy of reporting, facilitated disease-
outbreak containment, and resulted in an overall improvement in infectious
disease control and public health management. On average, there are 15,000
cases reported daily from hospitals and health centers across the country.
10.3.3 System impact and achievements
Since its deployment, the CISDCP Web-based disease surveillance system
has played an unparalleled role in the discovery and containment of infec-
tious diseases in a timely fashion. As a result, the system has done much to
protect the lives and health of an entire population, and reduce the financial
and human burden of infectious diseases on the Chinese society as a whole.
The main achievements of the system are listed below (Wang 2004, 2007):
1. Since 2004, real-time, case-specific reports direct to the centralized
data bank have taken the place of the previous system's reports of
monthly aggregated data. The new system also boasts a 10-fold
increase in overall reporting speed.
2. More cases have been able to be identified, and data reporting is
more timely and complete. Because reports are sent to the central
data bank directly, delays, such as those that happened during
the 2003 SARS outbreak, in data transmission from the local to
national level are avoided. In the first year of system use (2004), the
total number of infectious disease cases increased by 33% com-
pared to 2003. This pattern continued the following years, with
an increase from 390 million cases reported in 2004 to 443 million
reported in 2005. It has now reached a stable state. Missing reports
