Background: Morbidity, severity, and mortality associated with annual influenza epidemics are of public health concern. We analyzed surveillance data on hospitalized laboratory-confirmed influenza cases admitted to intensive care units to identify common determinants for fatal outcome and inform and target public health prevention strategies, including risk communication. Methods: We performed a descriptive ana...
The growth of digital communication technologies for public health is offering an unconventional means to engage the general public in monitoring community health. Here we present Influenzanet, a participatory system for the syndromic surveillance of influenza-like illness (ILI) in Europe. Through standardized online surveys, the system collects detailed profile information and self-reported symptoms volunteere...
The Internet is becoming more commonly used as a tool for disease surveillance. Similarly to other surveillance systems and to studies using online data collection, Internet-based surveillance will have biases in participation, affecting the generalizability of the results. Here we quantify the participation biases of Influenzanet, an ongoing European-wide network of Internet-based participatory surveillance sy...