For the first time, CDC’s new software tool is detecting outbreaks of viral hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola, Marburg, Rift Valley, Lassa, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fevers. The new CDC tool an Epi Info Viral Hemorrhagic Fever (VHF) application speeds up detecting diseases, finding people exposed to the disease, people possibly infected by the disease, and people with the contagious disease.
The development of the software tool was the result of a collaboration between CDC’s Epi Info team in the Center for Surveillance, Epidemiology, and Laboratory Services and the Viral Special Pathogens Branch in the National Center for Emerging Zoonotic Infectious Diseases.
Over the next five years, the initiative will strengthen the health infrastructure for at least 30 partner countries with four billion citizens. CDC has invested $40 million this year in the effort and President Obama has requested an additional $5 million in his 2015 budget request for this project.
This task called contact racing is essential in breaking the chain of disease transmission and ending an outbreak. In addition, to doing contact tracing, the tool assists with the collection and management of epidemiologic, clinical, and laboratory information for every case. This data is crucial to have to develop outbreak countermeasures.
CDC began development of the VHF application for Epi Info after the 2012 Ebola and Marburg hemorrhagic fever outbreaks in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After returning from the field, CDEC Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Officer Ilana Schafer approached the Epi Info team and discussed the need to find a better way to deal with outbreaks.
In 2012, Schafer was responsible for creating and maintaining centralized databases for all cases of epidemiologic, clinical, and laboratory information collected by international response partners that included Ministries of Health, Doctors without Borders, CDC, and the World Health Organization during three outbreaks.
Schafer was on the CDC/WHO team recently deployed to Guinea for the West Africa Ebola outbreak along with CDC Epi Info software developer Erik Knudsen who is tweaking the new VHF tool as needed.
Developing the VHF tool on the Epi Info platform was far more timely and cost effective than developing a specialized system. Once finalized as a standard feature and added to Epi Info, the tool will be available cost free to be adapted for future public health needs.
For more information, go to www.cdc.gov.