The epidemiology department conducts activities in the area of infectious diseases surveillance and outbreak response.
The team works with national, European and international organizations in setting up or strengthening national or regional surveillance systems, analyzing surveillance data and evaluating surveillance systems.
Team Activities
- Development of surveillance systems: writing of protocols, defining surveillance indicators, identifying data sources, defining data flows.
- Analysis of surveillance data: developing plan of analysis, setting up alert thresholds, conducting time series analysis, developing scripts and R packages.
- Automation of surveillance reports including data quality monitoring, and data visualization.
- Evaluation of surveillance systems: developing the surveillance evaluation protocol, defining priority surveillance attributes to evaluate, collecting data through qualitative and quantitative methods, writing the evaluation report, presenting the result to and discussing recommendations with the surveillance stakeholders.
- Participation in international outbreak responses: deployment of epidemiologists and data managers to support international outbreak responses with the Global Outbreak and Response Network
Epiconcept Supports
Through ECDC and European Commission funding the epidemiology department has been supporting European countries in setting up hospital surveillance networks for different diseases (eg pertussis in infants, invasive pneumococcal diseases, severe acute respiratory infections, hepatitis B, C), primary care sentinel surveillance (influenza, COVID-19). The team has also strengthened surveillance and response outside Europe (Angola, Indian Ocean, Tunisia, Haiti, Guinee Conackry) and conducted several surveillance systems evaluations.
