Sentiweb: French communicable disease surveillance on the world wide web

For 12 years the French Sentinel system has collected about 330 000 cases of eight communicable diseases in France from a sample of about 1% of the country's general practitioners (see box).1 These sentinel general practitioners use a PC with a modem or a videotex home terminal to transmit data to a front server.2 Case records are automatically stored in a relational database (Oracle), and the incidence of each disease, expressed in cases per 100 000 inhabitants, is calculated weekly. Incidences are calculated for each administrative district (96 departments and 22 regions in metropolitan France). Weekly electronic bulletins give feedback to the sentinel general practitioners and public health authorities. Since September 1995 the results of this communicable disease surveillance have been available on a worldwide web site called Sentiweb (http://www.b3e. jussieu.fr/sentiweb). Sentiweb also provides an …