- Abstract:
- Outbreaks of emerging disease spread in unexpected and poorly understood ways, and their growth can be explosive. Quick response, continuous tracking, and information-sharing are therefore essential.The Field Information Management System is a tool developed by the World Health Organisation to assist in the management of outbreaks of infectious diseases such as Ebola, Marburg Heamorrhagic Fever, and Avian Influenza, where the key to controlling the acute public health risk is in identifying the next wave of potential disease transmission. FIMS tracks cases and contacts, manages follow-up, tests, samples, reports, and supports visualisation of geographic information and infection transmission. Edinburgh has been involved from its inception, and developed the module to visualise transmission trees. This critical component (graphing infection contacts and transmission, optionally against time) greatly aids the process of piecing together disease progress, replacing hours of tedious labour on the part of field teams with a few seconds of computation.Building on experience during the Ebola outbreak in northern Uganda in 2000, FIMS's development has been a critical component of WHO's and GOARN's (*) ability to conduct international outbreak response operations. FIMS has been used already in the recent Marburg outbreak in Angola, and there is interest from governments world-wide in adding it to their health protection repertoire (80 users registered within GOARN).(*) Coordinated by WHO, the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network is a voluntary association of about 104 laboratories, national surveillance centres, and public health institutions in both developed and developing nations that have agreed to work together to co-ordinate the international response to infectious disease outbreaks. GOARN has already achieved some notable successes in high stakes events: it is credited, for example, with helping WHO respond effectively to the SARS epidemic.
- Links To Paper
- No links available
- Bibtex format
- @Misc{EDI-INF-RR-1048,
- author = {
Armand Bejtullahu
and Conrad Hughes
and Stuart Anderson
},
- title = {Field Information Management System (FIMS)},
- publisher = {World Health Organisation},
- year = 2005,
- month = {May},
- howpublished={Software},
- }
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