Abstract
An automated early warning system has been developed and used for
detecting clusters of
human infection with enteric pathogens. The method used requires no specific
disease
modelling, and has the potential for extension to other epidemiological
applications. A
compound smoothing technique is used to determine baseline ‘normal’
incidence of disease
from past data, and a warning threshold for current data is produced by
combining a
statistically determined increment from the baseline with a fixed minimum
threshold. A
retrospective study of salmonella infections over 3 years has been conducted.
Over this period,
the automated system achieved >90% sensitivity, with a positive predictive
value consistently
>50%, demonstrating the effectiveness of the combination of statistical
and heuristic methods
for cluster detection. We suggest that quantitative measurements are of
considerable utility in
evaluating the performance of such systems.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Infectious Diseases,Epidemiology
Cited by
51 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献，注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献，订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献