History

May — GeoSentinel awarded competitive funding through the Division of Quarantine, National Centers for Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under an initiative to strengthen surveillance and response to emerging pathogens.

Pilot studies are run and result in a refined surveillance instrument usable by practicing clinicians. International Surveillance Sites begin to join the network.

September — GeoSentinel goes “live” at participating Surveillance Sites using a single-page faxable form that links destination, date of travel, and disease diagnosis in returning travelers. Data from all Sites are centrally aggregated at the Atlanta data center.

May — Cooperative agreement between ISTM and CDC that provides core infrastructure support for GeoSentinel extended for 7 years.

June — The GeoSentinel database now contains records on 10,000 ill travelers, migrants, and refugees.

March — A public website is inaugurated to highlight current GeoSentinel Alerts and to provide concise summaries of important GeoSentinel findings to all ISTM members as well as to the public.

April — GeoSentinel trend graph analysis which plots month-by-month trends for 60 key travel-related diagnoses using baselines compiled beginning in 1997 detects out of season dengue in travelers to Thailand.

February — A GeoSentinel analysis of 22,000 patient records appears in the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal.

In response to threats of respiratory illness originating in Asia, a strategic expansion initiative begins in Asia with Sites at 3 important international gateways (Beijing, Singapore, Yokohama).

January — GeoSentinel in collaboration with CDC, Health Canada, and TropNet Europ identify falciparum malaria in significant numbers of resort travelers to the Dominican Republic.

January — A comprehensive analysis of 17,353 ill returned travelers from the developing world summarizing the GeoSentinel experience from 1996-2004 is published (N Engl J Med 2006; 254:119-30).

Strategic expansion in Europe begins that will by 2009 add Sites in Paris, Madrid, London, Oslo, Hamburg and Amsterdam. GeoSentinel now has 12 European Sites in 8 countries.

November — 12 European GeoSentinel Sites form a consortium to launch EuroTravNet, a new ISTM initiative in Europe that is funded for 4 years by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in Stockholm, after a Europe-wide open tender and competition process.

February — GeoSentinel HealthMap launches. All key diagnoses are automatically geo-located on a worldwide Google map in real time upon entry of the diagnosis into the GeoSentinel database. This is a customized GeoSentinel version of the public HealthMap.

May — Smartphone and e-mail push alerting goes live for individual GeoSentinel users. For select diagnosis codes, daily alerts show diagnosis and map geolocation for all applicable patient records entered since the previous alert.

February — GeoSentinel Site established in Leogane, Haiti to monitor illness in aid and relief workers post-earthquake.

July — CDC published Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on Surveillance Related to Travel-Related Disease: GeoSentinel Surveillance System.

October — Added symptoms, diagnostic testing, diagnostic specimen to the core form.

Restructured data collection on the core form to have the following tied to each diagnosis and not to the patient – diagnostic test, country/region of exposure, travel reason, travel-related (or not), diagnostic specimen.

GeoSentinel database contains >333,000 records of ill travelers. GeoSentinel has continued to be highly productive with 71 GeoSentinel sites in 30 countries and 221 Affiliate Members with a presence on every continent except Antarctica.

March — GeoSentinel launches Enhanced surveillance Respiratory Tract Infection project (Objective 4 of CITrSS protocol)