Implementing a global surveillance system for leishmaniasis
World Health Assembly resolution WHA60.13 (2007) requested WHO to raise awareness of the global burden of leishmaniasis and monitor progress in its control. To fulfil its mandate, WHO has implemented several activities to strengthen disease surveillance at country, regional and global levels.
Examples of work at country level are the web-based surveillance systems in Kenya and Nepal, where each health facility diagnosing and/or treating leishmaniasis enters data in a dedicated software to register core information about patients and treatment outcomes.
WHO has developed a set of core indicators for the countries to easily adapt and adopt forms in order to collect data for their specific needs, with the freedom to add additional variables or indicators.
At the regional level, the Americas has created a web-based leishmaniasis surveillance system, SisLeish, where each Member State enters data in order to calculate core indicators for standardized monitoring of the regional control programme. The regional data are subsequently analysed and annual epidemiological reports and country profiles are generated and made publicly available through the leishmaniasis website.
At the global level, WHO has created a web-based integrated data platform (WIDP) for Member States to upload data according to their level of endemicity. For countries that have difficulties in operating through the web-based forms, the system is configured to easily upload data received from MS Excel files.
High‐burden countries from each WHO region are given access to forms containing a larger number of variables (e.g. population at risk, disease distribution by gender and age group, number of cases by month and at subnational level, number of diagnostic tests conducted and results obtained, number of patients treated with each medicine and treatment outcome).
Data captured by WIDP enable the publication of detailed country profiles annually, interactive dashboards in the Global Health Observatory and articles in the Weekly Epidemiological Record.
