Acute watery diarrhoea surveillance in Nyaung Shwe Townshi

[Hteik Htar Tin]

After 2025 Sagaing earthquake, the basic water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) facilities are destructed, as pre-monsoon season has been starting in Myanmar, the risk of diarrhoea and cholera has been raised compared to previous years. According to Myanmar Health Cluster bulletin, nine of the affected 20 townships are identified as being at high risk for cholera highlighting the need for health and WASH infrastructures to prevent waterborne diseases. Due to lack of comprehensive surveillance system, Nyaung Shwe, has been suffering from both earthquake and flooding, and regarded as one of the cholera hotspot townships. The AWD risk index at Nyaung Shwe is 4 and is critical to take preventive actions.
The community clinics and volunteers will be sentinel sites, structured to be indicator-based and event-based surveillance which will be conducted as passive surveillance system. They will collect signals and cases as follow:
1) Acute watery diarrhoea (AWD) with no dehydration
2) Acute watery diarrhoea (AWD) with some dehydration
3) Acute watery diarrhoea (AWD) with severe dehydration

The objective is to detect and treat as early as possible at AWD with no dehydration stage, and to reduce the community transmissions and probable outbreak with early notification and response activities.

[Than Htike Aung]

Dear Ma Hteik Htar Tin,

Using two different platforms for data collection and combining into one is labour intensive especially when there is no automation process and requires regular data monitoring. I would like to suggest that using one platform or automated combination process will improve effective data utilization of this system.
Thank you.

[Wah Wah Lwin]

Hi Hteik Htar!

Thank you for your detailed, great and comprehensive presentation! And yes, AWD is one of consequences after the natural disaster, that needs to be tackled as a public and environmental health concerns.
Regarding my comment, I would agree with Ko Aung that using one reporting platform would be easier to collect the data and integrate to the system for real-time monitoring and analysis for quick response. Another comment: since the system requires timely reporting, how will it handle cases where users are unable to report within the provided timeframe due to internet connectivity issues? Are there any alternative channels available for reporting? For example, via messenger, telephone, etc.

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