Detectability of Epidemics from Over-the-Counter Sales

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究的总体目标是通过早期发现疾病爆发来改善灾害管理。我们将通过开展基础研究，确定其销售与住院等临床事件相关并先于临床事件的非处方（OTC）医疗保健产品，为实现这一目标做出贡献。研究结果将立即应用于全国零售数据监测，这是一个现有的系统，监测我们实验室开发的OTC医疗保健产品的销售。拟议的研究将回答有关监测哪种类型疾病的非处方（OTC）医疗保健产品的问题，以及爆发的规模和突然性必须在背景中检测到。 这项建议的具体目标如下： 1.通过在大量非处方药产品类别中搜索与一系列疾病最相关的非处方药产品类别，发现用于公共卫生监测的新非处方药医疗保健产品类别，并细化当前使用的非处方药产品类别 2.测量从最佳OTC医疗保健产品类别（由产品筛选研究确定）的销售中检测到自然发生的疾病爆发的时间，相对于从其他类型的监测数据中检测到的时间。 3.确定最佳OTC医疗保健产品类别（由产品筛选研究确定）的销售额在基线以上的最小增幅，我们可以通过研究不同爆发检测算法检测我们添加到销售数据中的模拟爆发的能力来检测。 4.通过采访市场领先产品的制造商（制造商访谈），确定对自我治疗行为的了解是否与相关性研究的结果一致。 研究小组在过去四年中一直在这一领域和密切相关的领域工作，因此为这项研究收集了一套独特的资源。这些资源包括零售数据集、参考疾病数据集和分析方法。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall goal of this research is to improve disaster management though early detection of outbreaks of disease. We will contribute to this goal by conducting basic research that identifies over-the-counter (OTC) healthcare products whose sales correlate and precede clinical events such as hospital admissions. The results of the research will find immediate application in the National Retail Data Monitor, an existing system that monitors sales of OTC healthcare products that was developed by our laboratory. The proposed research will answer questions about which over-the counter (OTC) healthcare products to monitor for which types of diseases, and how large and sudden must an outbreak be to be detectable over background. This proposal has the following specific aims: 1. To discover new OTC healthcare product categories for use in public health surveillance by searching the very large space of OTC product categories for those that best correlate with a range of diseases and to refine the OTC product categories in current use 2. To measure the time when naturally occurring disease outbreaks are detected from sales of the best OTC healthcare product categories (as determined by product screening studies) relative to the time when they are detected from other types of surveillance data. 3. Determine the smallest increase in sales of the best OTC healthcare product categories (as determined by product screening studies) above baseline that we can detect by studying the ability of different outbreak detection algorithms to detect simulated outbreaks that we add to the sales data. 4. Determine whether what is known about self-treatment behavior is consistent with results of correlation studies by interviewing manufacturers of market-leading products in each category about their marketing research (Manufacturer Interviews) The research team has worked in this and closely related areas for the past four years and as a result have assembled a unique set of resources for this study. These resources include sets of retail data, sets of reference disease data, and analytic methods.