Progress in Understanding and Using Over-the-Counter Pharmaceuticals for Syndromic Surveillance

Prospective spatial prediction of infectious disease: experience of New York State (USA) with West Nile Virus and proposed directions for improved surveillance

“…As with screening, prospective surveillance often does not monitor the outcome directly, but rather a suitable proxy that is much easier and faster to measure. Examples include suddenly higher-than-expected pharmaceutical sales (Magruder et al 2004), incident episodes of lower respiratory infection that may indicate an anthrax release (Klienman et al 2004) or, as detailed in the next section, host animal deaths may predict human infection of a zoonotic disease (Johnson et al 2006).…”

Syndromic Surveillance and Outbreak Detection Using Automated Microbiologic Laboratory Test Order Data

“…Spearman's rank correlation will be used to measure the strength of association over time between each laboratory test and each ICD-9 code based syndrome. We will consider overall correlation and "residual" correlation, after removing secular trends, seasonal and/or weekly patterns from the data [19]. This will allow us to distinguish between correlation due to similar cyclical patterns of disease and health care seeking behavior, and correlations due to unexpected changes in disease patterns.…”

“…Various systems incorporate non-clinical data, such as school or work absenteeism and over-the-counter medication sales, as well [12,19].…”

Detection Limit Used for Early Warning in Public Health Surveillance

“…This surveillance focuses on symptoms during the early phases of illness. [17][18][19][20][21][22] Actually analyzed are the volumes of emergency department patients, school and work absenteeism, the sales of the over-the counter (OTC) pharmaceutical products, etc. Magruder reported that, in the National Capital Area of the USA, some OTC influenza-remedy sales occurred approximately 3 days prior to physician-patient encounters.…”