Text messaging shows promise as surveillance tool for respiratory infections
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Text messaging showed promise as a surveillance tool to identify acute respiratory infections over a 5-year period in New York City, researchers found.
“The CDC was interested in identifying what were the most common respiratory infections detected using community surveillance, and we were additionally interested if text messaging could be used to conduct community surveillance longitudinally,” Melissa S. Stockwell, MD, MPH, FAAP, chief of the division of child and adolescent health at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, told Healio.
Stockwell and colleagues performed a 5-year longitudinal study from 2012 to 2017 in the Washington Heights/Inwood area of New York City. According to the study, they enrolled 405 households with 1,915 individuals and sent them research text messages twice weekly asking about symptoms of acute respiratory infection (ARI).
Researchers confirmed symptoms through a follow-up call. If two or more ARI criteria were met, they would obtain a midturbinate nasal swab in participants’ homes.
During the 5-year study period, 114,724 text messages were sent, with an average response rate of 78.8%. According to the study, swabs were collected for 91.4% of confirmed ARIs and 58.7% had a pathogen detected. Overall, rhino/enteroviruses (51.9%), human coronaviruses (13.9%) and influenza (13.2%) were the most commonly detected respiratory infections, with the overall incidence being highest among children aged younger than 2 years and lowest among 18- to 49-year-olds.
Stockwell said that this type of text message surveillance could be useful in pandemics, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, in which a modified format of this surveillance has already been used. Moving forward, she said the costs associated with these types of programs — which are typically funded at a national level — could be lowered by changing to self-swabs rather than by using research staff-obtained swabs, which is what is being done for various SARS-CoV-2 studies.
“The take-home message is that community surveillance can play an important complementary role to more completely understand disease burden by capturing non-medically attended acute respiratory surveillance during year-round surveillance,” Stockwell said.
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