Detectability of Epidemics from Over-the-Counter Sales

描述(由申请人提供)：这项研究的总体目标是通过及早发现疾病爆发来改善灾害管理。我们将通过进行基础研究，确定其销售与医院入院等临床事件相关并先于临床事件的非处方药(OTC)保健产品，从而为实现这一目标做出贡献。这项研究的结果将立即应用于国家零售数据监视器，这是我们实验室开发的一个监测非处方药保健品销售的现有系统。拟议的研究将回答以下问题：监测哪些非处方药(OTC)保健产品的哪些类型的疾病，以及疫情的规模和突发性必须有多大才能在背景中检测到。 这项建议有以下具体目标： 1.通过在非常大的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的非处方药保健产品类别，并改进当前使用的非处方药产品类别 2.测量从最佳非处方药保健产品类别(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.通过研究不同的疫情检测算法检测我们添加到销售数据中的模拟疫情的能力，确定我们可以检测到的最佳非处方药保健产品类别(由产品筛选研究确定)的销售额最小增幅。 4.通过对每个类别的市场领先产品的制造商进行市场调查(制造商访谈)，确定对自我治疗行为的了解是否与相关研究的结果一致。 研究小组在过去四年里一直在这一领域和密切相关的领域开展工作，因此为这项研究汇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.