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In public health, measures to control and prevent disease
often rely upon information transfer. For example, surveillence systems
are built on this principle.
Monitoring of disease in a population is dependent upon several different
sources of cases communicating with a common public health agency. The
Internet is likely to be an important means for communication in the future.
For 12 years the French
Sentinel system has collected about 330000 cases of eight communicable
diseases in France from a sample of about 1% of the country's general practitioners.
These sentinel general practitioners use a PC with a modem or a videotex
home terminal to transmit data to a front server. The incidence of each
communicable disease is expressed in cases per 100 000 inhabitants and
is calculated weekly. Sentiweb provides several ways to interactively consult
the database.
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