Hosted by Public Health Ontario
Disease surveillance is a core function of public health. This PHO Rounds discusses surveillance program activities, goals, relevant legislation, and ethical underpinnings, as well as the statistical theory behind comparisons of current with historical data. The presenter will discuss how surveillance can be implemented in various settings, from large infectious disease laboratories to small health units based on factors such as the counts of the disease or event of interest, the size of the population being surveyed, the technical capacity and equipment of the system operators and recipients, and the ideal time frame for intervention in case of an outbreak. These factors indicate the frequency with which surveillance should be conducted and whether a simpler or more complex model of expected counts should be used to compare with those observed.
Presenter(s): Dr. Ann Jolly
Dr. Ann Jolly, PhD started her career in the 1980s in the Northwest Territories evaluating the effects of safer sex messaging on STI rates. She completed her MSc and PhD at the University of Manitoba, working with laboratory and notifiable disease data on STBBI, estimating risk of sequelae, and defining transmission through sexual networks of connected individuals. She developed a weekly, automated laboratory based surveillance system for infectious disease at Cadham Provincial Laboratory which ran for three years. She pioneered network analyses of STBBI, TB, and MRSA and (during COVID) combined spatial and social network methods to demonstrate spread across Ottawa.