New methods developed by statisticians with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) have the potential to give an earlier-than-ever indication of flu season.

"Diseases such as flu can spread quickly. The swine flu outbreak – Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 – was, for example, threatening to overload intensive care services in Australian hospitals within weeks of being recognised in Mexico."
Dr Ryan said that e-Health technology provides huge amounts of data on hospital admissions, symptoms and locations that can be challenging to make sense of.
"We used archives of daily counts of emergency department visits from 12 NSW hospitals on seven different syndromes such as abdominal pain, influenza-like illness or respiratory conditions. We then adapted statistical control methods originally used to signal machinery failures in factories.
"We tested them on simulated health data and found we could detect an outbreak up to one day earlier than more conventional methods.
"Our statistical tools answer the question: how do you know when you’ve got a disease outbreak unfolding? They tell us what the usual pattern would be of, say, winter flu. Then we can understand the variations that might signal something more serious."
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"Health data has complexities which make it difficult to monitor, so any new techniques require careful evaluation,” Mr Muscatello said. “We don't expect to solve the problem in one go."
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For example, the methods could help narrow-in on a suburb with an outbreak of diarrhoea amongst school aged children. Preventive measures could then be rolled out, such as hand washing and ensuring infected children stay at home.
CSIRO is using the techniques to analyse flu data from other states and exploring the potential to build the statistical tools into hospital management software.
Statistical surveillance methods developed by CSIRO have also been used in monitoring traffic incidents, pipeline breakages, and financial fraud.
Source-Medindia