Defining overall sentinel surveillance on emerging (major) infectious diseases – a literature study

  Objective  To establish a general definition of overall sentinel surveillance (OSS) on emerging infectious diseases through reviewing relevant researches at home and abroad and clarifying dimensions of infectious disease sentinel surveillance to provide references to future studies on the issue.

  Methods  Related literatures were retrieved through China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and Web of Science. Content analysis and co-word clustering were used in sorting and categorizing the information about core definition of OSS on emerging infectious diseases; logical ‘deconstruction’ was used to explore dimensions of OSS for constructing the connotation and extension of OSS. The concept of OSS was defined based on formal logic definition method.

  Results  Six dimensions of OSS were involved in 121 published studies (114 in Chinese and 7 in English), including ‘subject’, ‘essential attribution’, ‘monitoring purpose’, ‘monitoring content’, ‘classification’, and ‘grading’. Key people and at high risk people are principal populations of sentinel surveillance on infectious disease and the aim of the sentinel surveillance is to make early detection and warning of infectious disease epidemic for developing effective prevention and control strategies on the epidemic. The designated sentinel institutions or departments are responsible to conduct surveillance on factors relevant to potential emerging infectious disease epidemic; the factors include demographics, population behaviors, epidemiologic characteristics, medical intervention, symptoms/signs of disease cases, and auxiliary examination.

  Conclusion   To make a clear definition of overall sentinel surveillance is of great significance for guiding contemporary practice in sentinel surveillance on emerging infectious disease epidemics.