Contact Tracing Activities during the Ebola Virus Disease Epidemic in Kindia and Faranah, Guinea, 2014.

The largest recorded Ebola virus disease epidemic began in March 2014; as of July 2015, it continued in 3 principally affected countries: Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Control efforts include contact tracing to expedite identification of the virus in suspect case-patients. We examined contact tracing activities during September 20-December 31, 2014, in 2 prefectures of Guinea using national and local data about case-patients and their contacts. Results show less than one third of case-patients (28.3% and 31.1%) were registered as contacts before case identification; approximately two thirds (61.1% and 67.7%) had no registered contacts. Time to isolation of suspected case-patients was not immediate (median 5 and 3 days for Kindia and Faranah, respectively), and secondary attack rates varied by relationships of persons who had contact with the source case-patient and the type of case-patient to which a contact was exposed. More complete contact tracing efforts are needed to augment control of this epidemic.

Implementing a DHIS2 Ebola virus disease module during the 2021 Guinea Ebola outbreak.

In 2017, the national agency for health security (L'Agence Nationale de Sécurité Sanitaire-ANSS) in Guinea implemented the District Health Information Software (DHIS2) as the Ministry of Health national surveillance system to capture and report aggregate disease data. During 2019, the ANSS started using DHIS2 Tracker to collect case-based (individual-level) data for epidemic-prone diseases. In 2020, the capability was expanded, and it was used during the COVID-19 pandemic to capture data relevant to the COVID-19 response. When an Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak was announced in February 2021, the Tracker module was updated, and enhanced functionalities were developed to meet the needs for the emerging epidemic. This novel EVD module has components to capture information on cases, contacts, alerts, laboratory and vaccinations and provides a centralised site for all EVD outbreak data. It has since been expanded for use with future viral haemorrhagic fever outbreaks.