Writing an Outbreak Investigation Report

Summary

An outbreak report is a document summarizing all the steps, main findings and recommendations of the outbreak investigation. It is a public record which has to be:

• objective to reflect the reality of the investigation,
• clear so that decision makers and the scientific community can understand and use its content, and
• timely to provide feedback and recommendations on time to those who need them.

It is better to have a short outbreak report soon rather than a very long document many months or years after the investigation.An outbreak investigation is not completed until the outbreak report is written and agreed upon by all partners involved in the investigation. This chapter describe why it is important to write it, who writes and who uses the outbreak report. Secondly we will present how the structure of the outbreak should be and then discuss the main problems encountered when writing an outbreak report.

In this chapter, we will describe what an outbreak investigation report is, why it is important, and who writes and reads it, then we will shortly present some "rules" about the writing style and the structure of the report, and finally present some common problems in writing the report.

Note

The concept of 'an outbreak investigation report' evolves. Various internet platforms, social media, rapid alert systems make that the different target audiences of outbreak investigations require different formats. Even when a solid preliminary outbreak report is published within 2 weeks in a public health journal, including hypotheses, methods, results and conclusions, then this may still be too late for some target groups of 'those who need to know'.

Websites of national and international public health institutes and agencies are being scanned daily by public health professionals in search of pieces of evidence that they can use in their daily professional decisions. More and more we seem to move to 'incremental online outbreak reports', where almost daily updated threat assessments aim to give the latest of knowledge and evidence in terms of risk groups and risk factors.

Epidemiologists therefore also need to adapt their way of working in terms of scientific output to address this evolving demand of reliable, sound, objective and structured information about ongoing outbreaks

FEM PAGE CONTRIBUTORS 2007

Editor

Karin Nygård

Original Authors

Alain Moren

Marta Valenciano

Contributors

Arnold Bosman

Sabrina Bacci

Lisa Lazareck

Karin Nygård