Event-based surveillance during EXPO Milan 2015. Rationale, tools, procedures, and initial results

More than 21 million participants attended EXPO Milan from May to October 2015, making it one of the largest protracted mass gathering events in Europe. Given the expected national and international population movement and health security issues associated with this event, Italy fully implemented, for the first time, an event-based surveillance (EBS) system focusing on naturally occurring infectious diseases and the monitoring of biological agents with potential for intentional release. The system started its pilot phase in March 2015 and was fully operational between April and November 2015. In order to set the specific objectives of the EBS system, and its complementary role to indicator-based surveillance, we defined a list of priority diseases and conditions. This list was designed on the basis of the probability and possible public health impact of infectious disease transmission, existing statutory surveillance systems in place, and any surveillance enhancements during the mass gathering event. This article reports the methodology used to design the EBS system for EXPO Milan and the results of 8 months of surveillance

COVID-19 news monitoring with Medical Information System (Medisys)

Dataset of metadata created with Europe Media Monitor (EMM)/Medical Information System (MediSys) processing chain from news articles. MEDISYS is a media monitoring system providing event-based surveillance to rapidly identify potential public health threats using information from media reports. The system displays only those articles with interest to public health (e. g. diseases, plant pests, psychoactive substances), analyses news reports and warns users with automatically generated alerts. This dataset has a focus on Covid-19. It provides a large set of metadata automatically extracted from news articles related to Covid -19, stored as rss/xml format. It is publicly available, and anyone can build applications on top of that. The current version contains 4 months of news articles, from December 2019 to April 2020, which corresponds to more than 6 Million news articles. There is one zip file per month, containing the whole metadata information. As a example, the biggest month is March 2020, it contains 4.1 million news articles, from 76 different languages, 36 million entity occurrences (person names, organization names, location names, …), 15 million dates, 0.8 million quotations. The information processed by MediSys is derived from the Europe Media Monitor (EMM). The freely accessible Europe Media Monitor (EMM) is a fully automatic system that analyses on-line media. It gathers and aggregates about 300,000 news articles per day from news portals world-wide in up to 80 languagesJRC.I.3-Text and Data Minin