Sentinel Surveillance System for Pediatric Communicable Diseases.

Purpose : The purpose of this study is to review the process for establishing a pediatric communicable diseases sentinelsurveillance system, and the results of operation based on the accumulated data to understand the descriptive epidemiologiccharacteristics of pediatric communicable diseases.Methods : A sentinel surveillance system for pediatric communicable diseases was developed in May 2001 with the 202doctors in pediatric clinics who participated voluntarily. The target diseases for sentinel surveillance were measles, mumps,rubella, chicken pox and aseptic meningitis. The case definitions of those diseases for surveillance were divided intoconfirmed cases and suspected cases by the diseases definitions of national notifiable diseases system. The participantsshould report as soon as possible when they diagnosed measles, mumps, rubella cases including suspected ones. But chickenpox and aseptic meningitis cases were reported once a week in regular base including zero report. We collected the datafrom May 2001 to December 2003 and showed the descriptive epidemiologic characteristics of each disease.Results : The average reporting proportion among survellance doctors has been increased, about 88% in 2003. Formeasles, 206 cases were reported in 2001, 10 cases in 2002, and 2 cases in 2003. Children under the age of 2 (53.4 %)showed the highest. Among the measles cases, 86.4% had no previous vaccination history, in case of mumps, 246 cases in2001, 241 in 2002, and 566 cases in 2003 were reported. Mumps showed seasunality, highest from April to June in eachyear. The sex ratio was about 1.5 ( M:F = 6:4). Among the reported cases, 76.9 % had previous MMR immunizationhistoiy at least one time. For Rubella, 9 cases in 2001, 3 in 2002, and no case were reported in 2003. The chicken pox caseproportion per 100 pediatric consultations showed peak in from May to June and from November to January. 3-5 year-oldchildren (45.7%) were showed high proportion by age.Conclusion : This study described the process of establishing and operating a system for the pediatric communicabledisease sentinel surveillance. We analyzed the desriptive epidemiologic characteristic of the reported data from May 2001 toDecember 2003. These data maybe useful to build the policy of public health management for communicable diseasescontrol system and vaccine preventable diseases.