West Nile Virus and Botulism Portal: A Case Study in Infectious Disease Informatics

Dead Crow Density and West Nile Virus Monitoring, New York

“…Although surveillance systems that use laboratory-confirmed cases will continue to have a critical role, a more rapid index of viral activity, such as New York's DCD index, may be useful in some situations. Even if increases in DCD provide an early warning of increasing viral activity and risk to humans, more research is required for systems that function well to share this information in real time, securely and confidentially, with appropriate public health partners who can adjust surveillance and control procedures (32–34). …”

Syndromic surveillance systems

“…BioPortal also replies on an HL7-based approach to transmit data as HL7-compliant XML messages. This allows for dynamic changes in the message structure (Hu, Zeng, Chen, Larson, Chang, & Tseng, 2005;Zeng, Chen, Tseng, Larson, Eidson, Gotham, et al, 2004).…”

Emergency Alerts as RSS Feeds with Interdomain Authorization

“…One vein of work to improve the infrastructure has been to analyze the implementation requirements for networks of different sizes and purposes [24][18] [14][6] [22], however, as we have noted, the fragility and problems that come from non-uniform systems argue strongly for unified solutions [31]. In that direction, there has been work in the creation of specialized information and alert portals, for example Zeng, et al's West Nile Virus and Botulism portal [34]. While disease information portals can help with the correlation of data from disparate sources, they are not as well suited for the active messaging and security that the PHIN PCA architecture has sought to solve though its messaging standards.…”