Fever in Children - an Assessment of Validity by a Shewhart Model in a Syndromic Surveillance System in China

The objective is to evaluate the validity of the signals generated by Shewhart chart to detect the increase in febrile children with patients with common infectious diseases. There were 28,049 and 42,029 reports for febrile patients in the two study counties during the 2-year period. The sensitivity were 29.03% and 34.78%. The PPVs were 64.29% and 53.33%. The sensitivity of signals in the syndromic surveillance system was low using the Shewhart model while the PPV was relatively high which suggested that this syndromic surveillance system had potential ability to supplement conventional case report system in detecting common infectious disease outbreaks.