Page 121 - Timeliness of Infectious Disease Notification & Response Systems - Corien Swaan

Timeliness of infectious disease reporting, the Netherlands, 2003-2017 119
The disease identification delay was the longest delay and showed most varia- tion between diseases, with medians ranging between 2 days (meningococcosis in period 1 and tetanus in period 2) and 55 days (brucellosis in period 3). The distribution of this delay per disease for period 3 is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Medians and boxplota for disease identification delay per infectious disease for period 3, the Netherlands, January 2013–November 2017 (n = 46,362)
CA-MRSA: community-acquired meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus; D1X: dis- ease identification delay; IQR: interquartile range; STEC: Shiga toxin-producing Escher- ichia coli.
a IQR: 25th–75th percentile in boxes, values between 1.5 IQR (lines) and outliers ( ͦ )
In order to visualise medians and IQR in the graph, extreme values > 3 IQR above the box were removed and, for brucellosis, only IQR is visualised. Tetanus is missing, as statisti- cal analysis could not be performed on data of one case.
The median notification delay decreased in period 2 for most diseases (10/18, with 4/10 statistically significant), see Table 1. A significant decrease was ob-
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