PAEDS - Surveillance
Paediatric Active Enhanced Disease Surveillance (PAEDS) is a system to identify conditions of public health importance in children with a focus on vaccine-preventable diseases.
PAEDS continues to provide unique policy-relevant data on serious paediatric conditions using sentinel hospital-based enhanced surveillance for conditions such as acute flaccid paralysis, encephalitis, COVID-19, influenza, Kawasaki’s Disease, Meningococcal Disease, PIMS-TS, and Streptococcus A. Throughout 2022, the Perth branch of PAEDS has captured 973 cases across all conditions under surveillance.
Key outcomes of PAEDS Australia-wide included:
- Contributing to national AFP surveillance to reach the World Health Organization reporting targets for detection of poliomyelitis (PIMS-TS) cases. PIMS-TS a rare condition that occurs predominantly in children following COVID-19 infection and can cause inflammation of the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin and eyes. It can be serious and require hospitalisation. The PAEDS group have demonstrated that incidences of this condition were higher during the Delta variant period, but significantly lower during the Omicron variant period, and cases continued to decrease over time with each new COVID-19 dominant variant.
- Conducting a COVID-19 serosurvey study aimed at detecting COVID 19 specific antibodies in children aged 0-19 years. This looked at data from November 2020 to March 2021, prior to our borders opening, and then from June to July 2022. The results found that at least 64 per cent of this age group had been infected with COVID-19 and, in the unvaccinated age group of one to four year olds, approximately 8 out of 10 children showed evidence of having had past infection.
PAEDS would like to thank the parents/carers and their children for their generous participation in our studies.