The Associated Press is reporting that many nations, in particular the USA, have changed their surveillance methods for keeping track of Swine Flue (H1N1), and are no longer counting confirmed cases. The justification for this is that the confirmed cases count was already massively underestimating the numbers affected, and in any case, it is no longer useful once the disease hits a certain proportion of the population. This may be true on a whole population level, but the move away from counting cases means that changes in particular populations and areas below subnational level are less observable – and this is a problem if the disease is affecting some groups and places more than others. It might for example be crucial to deciding who and where receives vaccinations, for example. There is also the added complication of budget cuts in local government surveillance resulting from the recession. As with many kinds of caring surveillance, one key question is not whether the surveillance is perfectly accurate, but whether the surveillance is ‘good enough’ for the purpose for which it is intended, and in the case of diseases, this is sometime a tricky thing to determine.
So are there better ways of doing it? Some private companies certainly think so. As I have reported before, Google and others reckon that online disease tracking systems will be vital in the future, so much so that Google in particular has gone rather over the top in its claims about what would happen if access to the data it used for these systems were restricted…
ubisurv 