Dirección General de Salud Pública, Consejería de Sanidad, Valladolid, Spain.
Influenza Other Respir Viruses. 2013 Jul;7(4):546-58. doi: 10.1111/j.1750-2659.2012.00422.x. Epub 2012 Aug 16.
Timely influenza surveillance is important to monitor influenza epidemics.
(i) To calculate the epidemic threshold for influenza-like illness (ILI) and acute respiratory infections (ARI) in 19 countries, as well as the thresholds for different levels of intensity. (ii) To evaluate the performance of these thresholds.
The moving epidemic method (MEM) has been developed to determine the baseline influenza activity and an epidemic threshold. False alerts, detection lags and timeliness of the detection of epidemics were calculated. The performance was evaluated using a cross-validation procedure.
The overall sensitivity of the MEM threshold was 71·8% and the specificity was 95·5%. The median of the timeliness was 1 week (range: 0-4·5).
The method produced a robust and specific signal to detect influenza epidemics. The good balance between the sensitivity and specificity of the epidemic threshold to detect seasonal epidemics and avoid false alerts has advantages for public health purposes. This method may serve as standard to define the start of the annual influenza epidemic in countries in Europe.
及时的流感监测对于监测流感疫情非常重要。
（i）计算 19 个国家的流感样疾病（ILI）和急性呼吸道感染（ARI）的流行阈值，以及不同强度水平的阈值。（ii）评估这些阈值的性能。
移动流行法（MEM）已被开发用于确定基线流感活动和流行阈值。计算了假警报、检测滞后和流行检测的及时性。使用交叉验证程序评估性能。
MEM 阈值的总体敏感性为 71.8%，特异性为 95.5%。及时性的中位数为 1 周（范围：0-4.5）。
该方法产生了一个稳健且特异性的信号，用于检测流感疫情。季节性疫情检测和避免假警报的流行阈值的敏感性和特异性之间的良好平衡，有利于公共卫生目的。该方法可作为定义欧洲国家年度流感流行开始的标准。
