Purpose: The purpose of this study is to review the process for establishing a pediatric communicable diseases sentinel surveillance system, and the results of operation based on the accumulated data to understand the descriptive epidemiologic characteristics of pediatric communicable diseases.
Methods: A sentinel surveillance system for pediatric communicable diseases was developed in May 2001 with the 202 doctors in pediatric clinics who participated voluntarily. The target diseases for sentinel surveillance were measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox and aseptic meningitis. The case definitions of those diseases for surveillance were divided into confirmed cases and suspected cases by the diseases definitions of national notifiable diseases system. The participants should report as soon as possible when they diagnosed measles, mumps, rubella cases including suspected ones. But chicken pox and aseptic meningitis cases were reported once a week in regular base including zero report. We collected the data from May 2001 to December 2003 and showed the descriptive epidemiologic characteristics of each disease.
Results: The average reporting proportion among survellance doctors has been increased, about 88% in 2003. For measles, 206 cases were reported in 2001, 10 cases in 2002, and 2 cases in 2003. Children under the age of 2 (53.4 %) showed the highest. Among the measles cases, 86.4% had no previous vaccination history. In case of mumps, 246 cases in 2001, 241 in 2002, and 566 cases in 2003 were reported. Mumps showed seasonality, highest from April to June in each year. The sex ratio was about 1.5 (M:F = 6:4). Among the reported cases, 76.9 % had previous MMR immunization history at least one time. For Rubella, 9 cases in 2001, 3 in 2002, and no case were reported in 2003. The chicken pox case proportion per 100 pediatric consultations showed peak in from May to June and from November to January. 3-5 year-old children (45.7%) were showed high proportion by age.
Conclusion: This study described the process of establishing and operating a system for the pediatric communicable disease sentinel surveillance. We analyzed the desriptive epidemiologic characteristic of the reported data from May 2001 to December 2003. These data maybe useful to build the policy of public health management for communicable diseases control system and vaccine preventable diseases.
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