Sentinel Surveillance in Travel Medicine: 20 Years of GeoSentinel Publications (1999–2018)

Extract

A recent comprehensive literature review highlighted that between 6% and 87% of travellers become ill during or as a result of their travel.¹ In this issue of the Journal of Travel Medicine, the value of sentinel surveillance in international travellers to identify and describe rare medical problems such as mycoses was highlighted.² In the time period from 1997 through 2017, 61 cases of mycoses were identified out of more than 60 000 included case records reported to GeoSentinel. GeoSentinel is a global surveillance network now consisting of 70 travel and tropical medicine centres situated in 31 countries across 6 continents. Although sentinel surveillance in individual travel medicine clinics is helpful,³ rare diseases such as mycoses, or emerging, and other novel epidemiological features of infectious diseases in travellers can only be studied through a global surveillance system of returning travellers such as GeoSentinel.

GeoSentinel was founded in 1995 by the International Society of Travel Medicine (ISTM) and is supported by ISTM the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Public Health Agency of Canada. GeoSentinel is based on the concept that travel medicine providers who encounter returning travellers are ideally situated to detect geographic and temporal trends in morbidity among travellers, and that by reporting such data centrally, such trends will be detected with greater frequency and expedience. Much of our knowledge on health problems and infections encountered by international travellers has evolved as a result of such sentinel surveillance.⁴