Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
13.5.2.3 Analysis for Detection of Events ................................ 260
13.5.2.4 Alerting and Reporting of Emerging Disease
Outbreaks....................................................................... 260
13.6. Conclusions ............................................................................................... 260
13.7 Future Work............................................................................................... 261
Acknowledgments .............................................................................................. 263
References............................................................................................................. 263
13.1 Introduction
Health officials in India and Sri Lanka do not receive health information in
a timely manner in order to prevent diseases from reaching epidemic states.
This was the case with chikungunya viral fever (Epidemiology Unit Sri
Lanka 2007), a communicable disease that did not require the Epidemiology
Unit to be “notified.” The current surveillance system does not provide the
much-needed “real-time” information flow and analysis to determine that
scattered cases are becoming a collective event needing reporting. The lack
of real-time disease detection can be overcome with reliable and robust ICTs and
intelligent software (Ganapathy and Ravindra 2008; Mechael 2006; Sabhnani
et al. 2005; Wagner et al. 2008).
The RTBP pilot promises to strengthen existing disease surveillance
and notification communication systems, reduce latencies in detecting
and communicating disease information, and set a standard interoper-
able protocol for disease information communication with national and
international health-related organizations in the region (Wagner et al.
2008).
Other initiatives of similar nature use mobile phones (or m-Health
programs) for disease surveillance. Three such programs are Cell-Life,
Episurveyor (Kinkade and Verclas 2008), and e-MICI (DeRenzi et al. 2008),
all developed for monitoring epidemiological information. However, these
applications are geared toward collecting data on specific, known diseases:
HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, child illnesses, etc. Moreover, they run
on high-end mobile phones or PDAs. The RTBP developed a system that
can survey all patient cases (disease and syndrome) in accordance with the
World Health Organization's policy of disease surveillance systems for mon-
itoring all diseases (World Health Organization [WHO] Regional Office of
Asia 2004).
RTBP is being strengthened around the ICT-based surveillance and notifi-
cation system. Pilot implementation in the two nations is a research project
aimed at evaluating a wider scale deployment in India and Sri Lanka with
the possibility of extending the RTBP to the region. The RTBP is made pos-
sible through a research grant from the International Development Research
Centre of Canada.
