1. How can surveillance help to detect and control the disease?
Surveillance is the ongoing, systematic collection, analysis and interpretation of health data. So, healthcare professional can timely detect the abnormal dengue cases distribution pattern through ongoing data collection and careful monitoring of its trend, it can help to respond the dengue infection before their epidemic peak level in the community.
2. Should we conduct active or passive surveillance or both for the disease, why?
For routine dengue surveillance system, we conduct passive surveillance focusing on data completeness and reliability of the reported cases, e.g. dengue is one of the notifiable diseases surveillances
As dengue is highly infectious vector borne diseases, active surveillance must do because public health staff engage actively in the system and can take prompt action for the detected cases in the community level, e.g. Hess test for every fever patient
If there is potential outbreak signal from passive surveillance, active surveillance must follow in the system to find the symptomatic patients and their contact tracing to prevent public health emergency, e.g. preventive measures for population and vector control activities
3. Which method should be best to identify cases, why?
1) Cases in medical facilities VS community
To identify cases, indicator-based surveillance is more specific to detect the signs and symptoms of dengue. After setting case definition, laboratory confirmation is required. So, cases in medical facilities should be the best compared to community.
2) Sentinel VS population-based surveillance
Sentinel should be the best to identify the cases. After getting data from medical facilities, we can start sentinel surveillance by doing line listing from the patients and start contact tracing. As dengue is vector borne diseases, the infection will be spread according to the vector’s habitat.
3) Case-based VS aggregated surveillance
Case-based surveillance is the best because it can detect the age cohort, it can get detail information of patient and line listing. But it is not suitable for large spreading condition.
4) Syndromic VS laboratory-confirmed surveillance
Laboratory-confirmed surveillance should be the best, because dengue needs to be confirmed from other fever with rash cases. The reliable antigen detection are now feasible and we can start vaccination for prevention.
4. What dissemination tools will you choose to disseminate monkeypox surveillance information? Why do you choose this/these tools?
I will choose ongoing real-time dissemination tool to disseminate the current monkeypox surveillance information in epidemic regions. Because monkeypox infection requires rapid public health intervention. We can detect geographical distribution and caseloads in timely manner and develop alerts immediately to the public.
For worldwide, I will choose periodic dissemination tool to do advance research and innovation for vaccines and treatment intention.