Toward the Development of an Integrated Climate-Sensitive Disease Surveillance in Southeast Asian Countries: A Situational Analysis

Abstract

Changes in climatic conditions influence the transmission of water and/or vector-borne diseases. It is one of the reasons for the emergence and re-emergence of various infectious diseases. This case study documents the learnings from selected Southeast Asian countries that can be useful for developing integrated disease surveillance and early warning system for selected climate-sensitive diseases. Through informal key-informant interviews and site-visits to Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and Thailand, we studied the disease surveillance, meteorological surveillance and early warning systems. These leanings suggest that an integrated data sharing mechanism is essential for real-time disease prediction. Further, there is immense scope for developing mechanisms on the uniform in data collection, data processing and analysis. There is an urgent need for developing a multi-sectoral collaborative plan for the integration of surveillance for real-time prediction of climate-sensitive diseases.

Keywords: Climate-sensitive diseases; Southeast Asia; disease surveillance; early warning.