Potential use of school absenteeism record for disease surveillance in developing countries, case study in rural Cambodia

PLoS One. 2013 Oct 14;8(10):e76859. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0076859. eCollection 2013.

Abstract

Background: Disease surveillance allows prospective monitoring of patterns in disease incidence in the general community, specific institutions (e.g. hospitals, elderly care homes), and other important population subgroups. Surveillance activities are now routinely conducted in many developed countries and in certain easy-to-reach areas of the developing ones. However due to limited health resources, population in rural area that consisted of the most the vulnerable groups are not under surveillance. Cheaper alternative ways for disease surveillance were needed in resource-limited settings.

Methods and findings: In this study, a syndromic surveillance system using disease specific absenteeism rates was established in 47 pre-schools with 1,417 students 3-6 y of age in a rural area of Kampot province, Cambodia. School absenteeism data were collected via short message service. Data collected between 1st January and 31st December 2012 was used for system evaluation for future potential use in larger scale. The system appeared to be feasible and acceptable in the rural study setting. Moderate correlation was found between rates of school absenteeism due to illness and the reference data on rates of attendance at health centers in persons <16 y (maximum cross-correlation coefficient = 0.231 at lag = -1 week).

Conclusions: School absenteeism data is pre-existing, easily accessible and requires minimum time and resources after initial development, and our results suggest that this system may be able to provide complementary data for disease surveillance, especially in resource limited settings where there is very little information on illnesses in the community and traditional surveillance systems are difficult to implement. An important next step is to validate the syndromic data with other forms of surveillance including laboratory data.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Absenteeism*
  • Cambodia
  • Child
  • Child, Preschool
  • Developing Countries / statistics & numerical data*
  • Female
  • Geography
  • Health Facilities / statistics & numerical data
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Population Surveillance*
  • Rural Population / statistics & numerical data*

Grants and funding

This work has received financial support from the Service 100 Fund of the Center of Development and Resources for Students, The University of Hong Kong, and from the Area of Excellence Scheme of the Hong Kong University Grants Committee (grant no. AoE/M-12/06). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.