Syndromic Surveillance for STEC infections
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Can syndromic surveillance add to the ‘Jigsaw’ of surveillance for Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) infection incidents, particularly in real time alerting to changing incidence?
IRAS ID
321014
Contact name
Elizabeth Coates
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
UK Health Security Agency
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 0 months, 0 days
Research summary
Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) infections can cause severe illness, with Haemolytic Uraemic Syndrome (HUS) being a major cause of kidney failure in children. While STEC outbreaks are rare, they have distressing impact on the families involved and cause significant illness. We monitor the infections by counting laboratory cases, but the need to strengthen this surveillance has been highlighted.
There is a statutory requirement to report STEC infection and Haemolytic Uraemic Syndrome, and the UK Health Security Agency runs a national surveillance system for STEC that collects patient identifiable clinical, microbiological and epidemiological data from all cases of STEC in England.
The UK Health Security Agency real time syndromic surveillance team use anonymised data (including the chief complaints of those who attend) on daily Emergency Department (ED) attendances to warn of and monitor a range of incidents including infections. In recent years the coverage of the scheme has been expanded and more standardised coding introduced. This gives us the potential to provide early warning of STEC outbreaks, because we are able to monitor people presenting to the Emergency Departments before the type f infection is confirmed in the laboratory. In order to do this, we need to understand how those with a known STEC infection are coded within Emergency Departments.REC name
Yorkshire & The Humber - Leeds East Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
23/YH/0030
Date of REC Opinion
13 Mar 2023
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion