Web surveillance can keep lethal infections at bay

TORONTO - Integrating real-time web-based infectious disease surveillance with knowledge of worldwide air traffic patterns could help keep lethal infections at bay at mass gatherings.

For instance, during the 1991 International Special Olympic Games in the US, an outbreak of measles was triggered by an athlete from Argentina, where a concurrent measles epidemic was underway.

With the world’s population approaching seven billion and expanding global access to commercial air travel, mass gatherings of hundreds of thousands of people have become commonplace at events like the Haj, G20 summits and the Olympic Games.

This ease of largescale movements through air travel can spur the spread of infectious diseases from one corner of the earth to another.

The article, based on the case of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games, proposes a tool that could be used to identify infectious diseases at their source and potentially help prevent the importation of infection into the site of the mass gathering.

“This integrated knowledge could be used to notify officials at the site of the gathering of an emerging international threat, and could potentially foster a culture of greater international cooperation…,” write John Brownstein, Children’s Hospital Boston and Kamran Khan, St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto who led the study.

The authors looked at historic patterns of international air traffic into Vancouver during February to predict where travellers would be originating from during the Winter Games.

While travellers came from more than 800 cities worldwide, almost two-thirds travelled from 25 centres on which the researchers concentrated real-time infectious disease surveillance.

These findings were published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.