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Keywords: Surveillance, event based surveillance, disease detection, Pakistan,
Introduction
Surveillance is an integral part of disease detection and evaluation of response activities. Standard surveillance definition revolves around systematic collection, analysis and interpretation of health data and dissemination of reports to the relevant public health communities.1 International Health Regulation (IHR) 2005 depicts an important public health aspect to “detect, assess and respond” to public health events that may pose a health risk at national and/or international level.2 Scope of disease detection ranges from emerging and re-emerging Infectious diseases and across the borders spread of epidemics and this cannot be done merely depending upon the traditional reporting going on around the world.3,4
In countries, where a robust Indicator-Based Surveillance system (IBS), tailored to frequency of reporting exists, outbreak detection and response is easy and timely.5 However, in resource-poor countries, a relatively new event-based and syndromic approach has been considered as a compliment to routine IBS to detect infectious diseases to smartly use the resources and save the response time.6
Evidence suggests that Event based surveillance (EBS) remained a primary source of information in situations such as mass gatherings, disasters and small scale outbreaks in developing countries so as in Pakistan.7-9 While in standardized and uniform Indictor-Based surveillance (IBS), events can be missed even if data is analysed on routine basis and its timely reporting is also an issue.
In Pakistan, IBS exists in public sector health facilities and in various vertical preventive programs such as National TB control Program, HIV/AIDS Control Programe but it effectiveness and contributions has not been measured. Limited evidence is available on existence and functions of EBS. Although IBS has been evaluated by researchers so there is a need to determine reporting pattern of diseases detected by EBS, along with geographical network of reporting. Our study was aimed to determine the existence, reporting and timeliness EBS in detection and containment of infectious diseases in Pakistan. Our objectives were to determine the kinds of diseases being reported by the system, the sources of initial information, the type of case definitions used and the time between the first report and response of the system.
Methodology
It was a cross sectional study based on retrospective record review of event based surveillance. Disease Surveillance and Response Units...