Lessons learned from identifying clusters of severe acute respiratory infections with influenza sentinel surveillance, Bangladesh, 2009-2020.

ABSTRACT:

Background

We explored whether hospital-based surveillance is useful in detecting severe acute respiratory infection (SARI) clusters and how often these events result in outbreak investigation and community mitigation.

Methods

During May 2009-December 2020, physicians at 14 sentinel hospitals prospectively identified SARI clusters (i.e., ≥2 SARI cases who developed symptoms ≤10 days of each other and lived <30 min walk or <3 km from each other). Oropharyngeal and nasopharyngeal swabs were tested for influenza and other respiratory viruses by real-time reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR). We describe the demographic of persons within clusters, laboratory results, and outbreak investigations.

Results

Field staff identified 464 clusters comprising 1

SUBMITTER: Islam MA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10515138 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature