A Review of Epidemic Surveillance Systems for Infectious Diseases

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic revealed that various healthcare systems in the world are fundamentally weak. Compared with many developed countries, the ability of India to tackle a pandemic seems to be much lower and the medical system in the nation is grossly inadequate. Some disease outbreaks, if not detected and controlled at an early stage, have the potential to turn into an epidemic or even a pandemic, which can disrupt the commercial growth of the nation and the health of human resources. By extracting disease outbreak information scattered in online newspapers and hospital records, the onset of deadly diseases can be detected at an early stage and health officials can be alerted. The objective of this paper is to study various approaches used for the development of biosurveillance systems existing in the world. A review of the current surveillance system in India, specifically Kerala is also done. Existing surveillance systems are capable of sensing outbreaks happening in the world or in a particular country. It can provide comprehensive information which can alert health officials. The proposed research is intended to develop an epidemic intelligent system by mining structured and semi-structured data available in online news ports and publishing outbreak information in real-time, considering the health domain of Kerala in particular. It is a novel approach for investigating local or regional level outbreaks happening in various parts of Kerala to enable authorities to act upon the information received to prevent the spread of deadly diseases.