Date of Award

January 2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Public Health (MPH)

Department

School of Public Health

First Advisor

Debbie Humphries

Abstract

Public health surveillance is a system used to help make important public health decisions to control the spread of the disease, based on scientific database, which includes collecting, analyzing, and disseminating information about the disease in interest. The fundamental principle of public health surveillance is to help the decision makers in a timely manner at the lowest possible cost while controlling the disease.1 For this study, the focus is on the evaluation of economic loss from salmonella outbreaks in Connecticut from 2012 to 2018.

Data were collected from FoodCORE, which stands for Foodborne Diseases Centers for Outbreak Response Enhancement, and is under CDC specifically responsible for disease outbreak surveillance.2 Based on the collected data, the specific number of cases are categorized and summarized, and the prices for each category are gathered from different sources, mainly official governmental sources, and adjusted for inflation. Consequently, the specific cost of each category, the yearly cost, and the total cost could all be calculated with the gathered information. Regarding the results from this study, an overall increasing trend is actually observed from the estimation, and it seemed that hospitalization is one of the major components with the highest unit price. There are also some problems founded like redundancy in testing to confirm the cases by different organizations. Consequently, there could be strategies applied regarding to the founded problems to further decease the economic loss generated from salmonella outbreaks, and could also be applied to other similar infectious disease surveillance and control systems.

Comments

This thesis is restricted to Yale network users only. This thesis is permanently embargoed from public release.

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