International Workshop on Participatory Surveillance (IWOPS) in Newcastle

Just had the wonderful opportunity to convene the 3rd IWOPS in Newcastle. Great to catch up with colleagues from around the world working on participatory surveillance. Thanks so much to the Skoll Global Threats Fund for supporting the workshop.   The workshop ended with a seminar at HMRI which is available on Youtube. I interviewed a range of innovators on the enablers and supports for innovation in public health surveillance - both organisationally and personally. And asked them what was around the corner for innovation in public health surveillance from a tech perspective.

Flutracking Launch Video - Tracking Flu Near You

Flutracking has launched again for 2014 - we made this short animated explainer video.  Invite all your friends to join Flutracking.net - takes just 10 seconds per week!

International Online Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Systems Unite

On April 15 in Amsterdam, the three largest online ILI surveillance systems in the world signed an agreement to share data and harmonise analysis and data display to help build a global picture of influenza transmission.  The collaborators at the official signing were the lead researchers (from L to R) from Flutracking.net Australia (Craig Dalton),Influenzanet Europe (Ronald Smallenburg and Daniella Paolotti) and Flu Near You USA (John Brownstein - Health Map and Mark Smolinkski - Skoll Global Threats)
More on the share learnings from this meeting soon.

H7N9 - Betting its not a pandemic in the making.

So the world is watching the emergence of H7N9 avian influenza - the H7 strain not usually infecting humans - causing severe illness and death in China. But I think it is this paper: Using Routine Surveillance Data to Estimate the Epidemic Potential of Emerging Zoonoses: Application to the Emergence of US Swine Origin Influenza A H3N2v Virus,  and reflecting on the emergence of the 2009 pandemic that causes me to doubt the pandemic potential of an influenza virus that, when we first hear about it, is apparently directly associated with zoonotic spill over - not in all cases but in significant numbers of cases. 

I think the chance of us “being there” in the early days or weeks of the next pandemic and actually seeing it spill from animals to humans is extremely remote and so when we see significant numbers of cases associated with chicken or pig exposure, as in the current H7N9 issue and the recent pig associated H3N2 clusters in the USA,  then I suspect it will more often then not stay that way.    I suspect most of the initial spill overs will escape our surveillance and arise in humans without any immediately recognised links to animals – as did the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.  But this is just a probabilistic argument which will fail sometimes - hence the need to remain watchful.

Blogging CDC 2013 Canberra, Australia, Day 1

Blogging some highlights from the Australian CDC 2013 Conference - the peak biannual communicable disease surveillance conference in Australia. The presentations should be available on the website soon. Some highlights from the morning panel session was John Kaldor's (from Kirby Institute) comment that the decreased rate of viral warts in young men prior to the roll out of the male HPV vaccine suggests "that we probably don't need to vaccinate guys as the women have it covered".   Rosemary Lester, CHO of Victoria - but speaking as chair of the Communicable Disease Network of Australia described a vision of national surveillance out to 2020. Allan Cheng from University of Melbourne asked what were the barriers to a CDC i.e. a federal centre for disease control akin to the US CDC or European ECDC in Australia.  It was obvious that this was an uncomfortable question for some of the panelists.More highlights..