Here is an interesting research Project: Transformations in Global Public Health Surveillance.
Principle Investigator(s): Eric Mykhalovskiy, Lorna Weir
Co-Applicant(s): Barbara Godard
HCTP/ICE Support: $7,958.50 (June 2006-May 2007)
HCTP/ICE Themes: Places, Technologies
Abstract
With the emergence of the Internet and 24/7 global health news, radical transformations have occurred in the conditions for knowing and responding to global disease threats. The invention of online techniques for global public health surveillance has dramatically changed the time, space, action capacity and social organization of global infectious disease control. Online early warning alerts are global technologies of the new international public health care.
The present proposal seeks to understand what led the World Health Organization (WHO) to decide in the mid-1990s that its previous system for reporting global infectious disease outbreaks was inadequate and to become interested in online detection systems, a move from what is called “passive†to “active†surveillance. In particular, this research seeks to understand the impact of the Surat (India) and Kikwit (Zaire) epidemics (1994 – 1995) on the WHO, which received international criticism for its handling of these events.
Archival research at the WHO Archives during August 2006 will document how the system of infectious disease report used by the WHO from its inception until the early 1990s was problematized. This research will show how pressure for change was articulated inside the WHO.
Collaboration with Prof. Barbara Godard, Professor of English and Avie Bennett Chair in Historical English Literature at York University (see attached CV in OGS format), enables this project to analyse cross-linguistic reporting in the two surveillance systems under investigation. We are particularly interested in developing a better understanding of the challenges and problems facing the new automated translation systems in current online early warning outbreak alert technologies.
Preparation for archival research at the WHO Archives will begin in June 2006 with a review of online WHO documents. A research assistant will assist with this work as WHO online documentation is enormous.
This project is completion research on a larger project dealing with the formation of new techniques of global public health surveillance in the mid-to late 1990s. Prof. Mykhalovskiy and I are interested in how global online outbreak detection was formed, how it works, and what its effects are. Previous interview research has taken place at The Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN), WHO, Pro-MED Mail and Factiva. Palgrave and Routledge have each offered us a book contract for this project.
Seems like something our colleague Fearnley should be on top of. This online reporting stuff is interesting, and sounds a bit like the Parsons program I posted on some time back. More empirics and some distinctions would be helpful here.
Have they written anything about this to date? I have been following these technologies from a distance (GPHIN and ProMED Mail). I’m a bit confused about why they call it a shift from “passive” to “active” surveillance. In my understanding, active surveillance is when an epidemiologist/public health worker actively contacts sites (hospitals, labs, etc.) in order to collect disease information. See, for example, CDC’s FoodNet:
“The core of FoodNet is laboratory-based active surveillance at over 650 clinical laboratories that test stool samples in the ten FoodNet sites. In active surveillance, the laboratories in the catchment areas are contacted regularly by collaborating FoodNet investigators to collect information on all of the laboratory-confirmed cases of diarrheal illness.
Information is being collected on every laboratory-diagnosed case of bacterial pathogens including Salmonella, Shigella, Campylobacter, Escherichia coli O157, Listeria monocytogenes, Yersinia enterocolitica, and Vibrio and parasitic organisms including Cryptosporidium and Cyclospora infection among residents of the catchment areas of the FoodNet sites; this information is transmitted electronically to CDC.
In addition to collecting laboratory-diagnosed cases of foodborne pathogens, investigators at FoodNet sites began active surveillance for hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) (a serious complication of E. coli O157 infection). The result is a comprehensive and timely database of foodborne illness in a well-defined population.”
The new, online global surveillance seems novel rather because it is: 1) automatic; 2) global, rather than ‘international’, b/c data comes from many Non-Gov sources; and 3) generic.
Also see my earlier post on internet blogging as an ‘early warning system” for avian flu.
http://anthropos-lab.net/vss/2007/01/bird-flu-news-picking-up/
Perhaps “active” means that WHO is not passively waiting for reports to come in, but rather actively searches the web for particular events? The distinction active/passive is of course a polemic one, or at least asymmetric. Who wants to be passive nowadays?
From a “problematization” point of view, it would be interesting to know more about the crisis that they mention:
“In particular, this research seeks to understand the impact of the Surat (India) and Kikwit (Zaire) epidemics (1994 – 1995) on the WHO, which received international criticism for its handling of these events.”