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The Centre for Health Protection (CHP) of the Department of Health (DH) today (December 3) launched a sentinel surveillance system involving more than 40 child care centres to further improve the sensitivity of the detection of a communicable disease outbreak in the community.

Under the new system, participating child care centres report weekly statistics on absenteeism, fever, diarrhoea and vomiting among children in these centres.

"One of the aims of this new system is to detect early signs of increase in communicable diseases among children attending child care centres at the community-wide level and to issue a timely public health alert," a CHP spokesperson said.

He said a pilot scheme of the system was carried out in March, 2004, involving 10 child care centres with positive feedback and the new system has recently extended to another 36 child care centres.

Starting from today, surveillance data collected from these child care centres together with interpretive notes will be uploaded to the CHP website (http://www.chp.gov.hk) and the DH websites (http://www.dh.gov.hk) every Friday afternoon under the "Sentinel Surveillance" section.

Ends/Friday, December 3, 2004

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