Using healthcare-seeking behaviour to estimate the number of Nipah outbreaks missed by hospital-based surveillance in Bangladesh.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Understanding the true burden of emergent diseases is critical for assessing public-health impact. However, surveillance often relies on hospital systems that only capture a minority of cases. We use the example of Nipah-virus infection in Bangladesh, which has a high case-fatality ratio and frequent person-to-person transmission, to demonstrate how healthcare-seeking data can estimate true burden.

Methods

We fit logistic-regression models to data from a population-based, healthcare-seeking study of encephalitis cases to characterize the impact of distance and mortality on attending one of three surveillance hospital sites. The resulting estimates of detection probabilities, as a function of distance and outcome, are applied to all observed Nipah outbreaks between

SUBMITTER: Hegde ST 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6693802 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature