Evaluation of an Internet-based monitoring system for influenza-like illness in Sweden.

Autor: Moa Rehn, AnnaSara Carnahan, Hanna Merk, Sharon Kühlmann-Berenzon, Ilias Galanis, Annika Linde, Olof Nyrén
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2014
Předmět:
Zdroj: PLoS ONE, Vol 9, Iss 5, p e96740 (2014)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1932-6203
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0096740
Popis: To complement traditional influenza surveillance with data on disease occurrence not only among care-seeking individuals, the Swedish Institute for Communicable Disease Control (SMI) has tested an Internet-based monitoring system (IMS) with self-recruited volunteers submitting weekly on-line reports about their health in the preceding week, upon weekly reminders. We evaluated IMS acceptability and to which extent participants represented the Swedish population. We also studied the agreement of data on influenza-like illness (ILI) occurrence from IMS with data from a previously evaluated population-based system (PBS) with an actively recruited random sample of the population who spontaneously report disease onsets in real-time via telephone/Internet, and with traditional general practitioner based sentinel and virological influenza surveillance, in the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 influenza seasons. We assessed acceptability by calculating the participation proportion in an invited IMS-sample and the weekly reporting proportion of enrolled self-recruited IMS participants. We compared distributions of socio-demographic indicators of self-recruited IMS participants to the general Swedish population using chi-square tests. Finally, we assessed the agreement of weekly incidence proportions (%) of ILI in IMS and PBS with cross-correlation analyses. Among 2,511 invited persons, 166 (6.6%) agreed to participate in the IMS. In each season, 2,552 and 2,486 self-recruited persons participated in the IMS respectively. The weekly reporting proportion among self-recruited participants decreased from 87% to 23% (2011-2012) and 82% to 45% (2012-2013). Women, highly educated, and middle-aged persons were overrepresented among self-recruited IMS participants (p
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