A method for estimating from thermometer sales the incidence of diseases that are symptomatically similar to influenza

Villamarín, Ricardo; Cooper, Gregory; Wagner, Michael; Tsui, Fu-Chiang; Espino, Jeremy U.

doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2013.02.003

i

A method for estimating from thermometer sales the incidence of diseases that are symptomatically similar to influenza

Supporting Files

Mar 14 2013
By Villamarín, Ricardo ; Cooper, Gregory ; Wagner, Michael ; ...

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Alternative Title:

J Biomed Inform
Personal Author:

Villamarín, Ricardo ; Cooper, Gregory ; Wagner, Michael ; Tsui, Fu-Chiang ; Espino, Jeremy U.
Description:

Early detection and accurate characterization of disease outbreaks are important tasks of public health. Infectious diseases that present symptomatically like influenza (SLI), including influenza itself, constitute an important class of diseases that are monitored by public-health epidemiologists. Monitoring emergency department (ED) visits for presentations of SLI could provide an early indication of the presence, extent, and dynamics of such disease in the population. We investigated the use of daily over-the-counter thermometer-sales data to estimate daily ED SLI counts in Allegheny County (AC), Pennsylvania. We found that a simple linear model fits the data well in predicting daily ED SLI counts from daily counts of thermometer sales in AC. These results raise the possibility that this model could be applied, perhaps with adaptation, in other regions of the country, where commonly thermometer sales data are available, but daily ED SLI counts are not.
Subjects:

Article Bayes Theorem Commerce Disease Outbreaks Estimation H1N1 Humans Incidence Influenza, Human Influenza A Virus, H1N1 Subtype Pennsylvania Symptomatically-like Influenza Thermometers
Source:

J Biomed Inform. 46(3):444-457.
Pubmed ID:

23501015
Pubmed Central ID:

PMC4609543
Document Type:

Journal Article
Funding:

1U38 HK000063-01/HK/PHITPO CDC HHS/United States ; P01 HK000086/HK/PHITPO CDC HHS/United States ; R01 LM009132/LM/NLM NIH HHS/United States ; U38 HK000063/HK/PHITPO CDC HHS/United States
Volume:

46
Issue:

3
Collection(s):

CDC Public Access
Main Document Checksum:

urn:sha256:3433a3c29e0ddf3cd511eaffff21bdcc03f2dd61882e746e5d37c61e01e4a790
Download URL:

https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/35081/cdc_35081_DS1.pdf
File Type:

[PDF - 3.26 MB ]

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