A new report published by the Arizona Department of Health Services’ Office of Infectious Disease Services examines the epidemiology of selected infectious diseases in recent years. The report contains an overview of Arizona’s surveillance system, graphs and maps on more than 25 different reportable conditions and links to other ADHS tables and reports for 2008-2013.
According to Dr. Cara Christ, Director for the Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS), among many other topics, the report contains sections showing an increase in Shiga toxin-producing E. coli and pertussis cases over this six-year period.
The purpose of the report is to describe Arizona’s infectious disease surveillance system and summarize surveillance information for cases reported to the Arizona public health system during the period of 2008 through 2013. (Read the report here)
Report highlights:
Data showed that vaccine-preventable diseases “is the only category which shows a steady increase in the number of reported cases, going from 358 in 2008 to 1,568 in 2013 (with an average increase of 242 cases per year).”
The number of reported cases for the remaining categories shows little variation between 2008 and 2013.
A total of 181,787 confirmed or probable cases of infectious diseases, excluding sexually transmitted diseases, tuberculosis, hepatitis C, and HIV, have been reported from 2008 to 2013. Of these, 41% (74,916 cases) were influenza or RSV cases, 34% (62,142 cases) were coccidioidomycosis cases and 9% (17,114 cases) were cases of enteric diseases. The remaining 16% of the cases (27,615 cases) are divided among invasive diseases, hepatitides, other diseases, vaccine-preventable diseases and vector-borne and zoonotic diseases.
Vector-borne and zoonotic diseases include Mosquito-borne, Tick-borne, and Flea-borne diseases such as Dengue, West Nile virus, Colorado tick fever, Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, plague, hantavirus infection, hemorrhagic fever, leptospirosis, and rabies.
An average of 30,000 confirmed and probable cases of infectious diseases, across all categories have been reported each year from 2008 to 2013, with a maximum of 42,387 cases in 2009 and a minimum of 19,968 cases in 2008. This
corresponds to an average rate of 377 cases per 100,000 population per year. Flu, RSV and coccidioidomycosis are the categories mainly responsible for the yearly fluctuations observed.
The influenza pandemic in 2009 largely accounts for this surge in total cases, and more specifically influenza cases, in 2009.