Concordance between the Clinical Diagnosis of Influenza in Primary Care and the Epidemiological Surveillance Systems

The GAVINA group of the USR in Terres de l'Ebre has published a new article that forms part of the PREVIGrip project and serves as a preamble to Elisabet Castro's doctoral thesis.

This article evaluates whether there is concordance between the rates of clinically diagnosed cases and the rate of cases confirmed by the network of influenza sentinel doctors.

Health authorities use different systems for influenza surveillance. Sentinel networks provide information on the number of weekly flu cases in the population under surveillance, based on laboratory-confirmed cases. In addition, there is a public website, DiagnostiCat, which publishes the number of weekly clinical diagnoses at the end of the registration week, while the sentinel network publishes its report later. Thus, one advantage of this surveillance system is the early publication of the number of cases, which allows greater anticipation in order to manage the annual flu epidemic.

Influenza data from the 2010-2011 season to the 2018-2019 season were used.

The study concluded that there is concordance between clinical diagnosis and confirmed cases of influenza.

Therefore, clinical diagnosis cases registered in DiagnostiCat could be a good alternative to traditional surveillance based on case confirmation.

Complete article: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/3/1263

The GAVINA Group is made up of Mª Rosa Dalmau Llorca, Carina Aguilar Martín, Noèlia Carrasco Querol, Zojaina Hernández Rojas, Emma Forcadell Drago, Dolores Rodríguez Cumplido, Elisabet Castro Blanco, Josep Mª Pepió Vilaubí, Alessandra Queiroga Gonçalves, Ermengol Coma Redón and José Fernández Sáez.