Comparison of National Malaria Surveillance System With the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System in the United States.

BACKGROUND: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is in the process of integrating the existing dual mechanisms for reporting cases of malaria diagnosed in the United States into a single electronic reporting mechanism. Before adoption of this new system, an evaluation of the existing systems for state-level reporting of malaria data to the CDC was conducted. METHODS: CDC guidelines for evaluating surveillance systems were used to assess the attributes of the National Malaria Surveillance System (NMSS), the current National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS), and the projected fully integrated NNDSS. We analyzed data collected from NMSS and NNDSS from 2001 to 2005 using the Chandra-Sekar-Deming method to estimate completeness of reporting. RESULTS: The projected fully integrated system was assessed likely to perform better than either of the existing systems on all attributes except stability. The overall completeness of reporting was estimated to be 80.3 percent for NNDSS and 74.7 percent for NMSS. CONCLUSIONS: Both existing systems have reasonably high ascertainment of cases. A fully integrated system with malaria-specific data fields would improve upon existing systems if it proved to be stable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]