On February 16, 2000, a local university notified the Akron Health Department about a gastrointestinal illness outbreak. Initial interviews indicated that the illness was occurring in students who had eaten in the single dining hall February 13, 14, or 15. Dining hall records showed that 895 students had eaten in the dining hall on at least one of those days. Limited personnel, time constraints, and difficulty contacting mobile students necessitated use of a random sample of the 895 students to identify more cases. A random number generator chose 250 numbers (calculated sample size) to select names from an alphabetized list. We decided to use an email questionnaire because many of the students had an email address on the university’s publicly listed website. One hundred forty-one students received email questionnaires to complete and email back. One hundred nine questionnaires (with SASE) were sent via United States mail to the dormitory addresses of the students without published email addresses. 17.7% of the email questionnaires and 10.1% of the regularly mailed questionnaires were returned (total return rate 14.4%). Our initial attempt with this technology was not disappointing. Despite what may be low returns we were satisfied to see that it was feasible. Items to consider for local health departments that may wish to use this technology to aid outbreak investigations include confidentiality issues, computer issues (ability to send out multiple emails), methodological issues (expertise to design email questionnaires in which completed data can be dumped into a data base for analysis), follow-up.
Learning Objectives: At the end of this session, the participant will be able to: 1. Describe the process a local health department used to conduct an outbreak investigation using email; 2. List the issues a local health department would need to consider if it chose to use email technology for outbreak investigation.
Keywords: Outbreaks, Communicable Disease
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: None
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.