Enhancing Generic Preparedness towards Global Health Events Using Syndromic Surveillance: A European Perspective

Syndromic surveillance can be a useful and cost-effective tool for public health in response to global health challenges: for situational awareness after disasters or detection and timely monitoring of emerging outbreaks.

The approach of syndromic surveillance envisages providing timely information analysing information routinely collected for other purposes, e.g., patient treatment data, over-the-counter drug sales or internet search trends. Its cost-effectiveness (using routine data and automated standard IT applications for data collection and analysis) makes it specifically suitable and advantageous also for use in resource poor settings.

Examples for the use of syndromic surveillance concerning supra-national health threats from Europe comprise the confirmation of (no) health impact after environmental threats such as heat wave in Western Europe in 2006 or the volcanic ash plume covering Europe in 2010. Early information on the health impact of emerging infectious disease outbreaks was provided by syndromic surveillance for example during the A/H1N1 pandemic in 2009.

There is a variety of syndromic surveillance initiatives in Europe. Many are locally/regionally confined and it is difficult to assess if the systems are running on a regular and continuous basis. In France and the UK, there are systems established at the national level. Two European projects (EuroMOMO, EuroHEAT) touched syndromic surveillance having another foci. There is only one European approach: the SIDARTHa project developed a syndromic surveillance approach based on the specific data source of emergency care data at the regional level across different European countries. A new project of the EU Public Health Programme is seeking a review of all syndromic surveillance activities in Europe to define a harmonized approach for the future (Triple S-AGE).

The presentation will discuss results from various European syndromic surveillance activities regarding their usefulness for generic preparedness of global health threats.