The Automation of the Polio Surveillance Workflow

Polio surveillance plays an important role in addressing the issue of polio eradication. Despite many years of attempting to eradicate poliomyelitis, it appears that polio virus is reemerging, this is an immense concern regarding public health. The current polio surveillance system in South Africa relies heavily on manual mediation and is therefore very time consuming. The National Institute for Communicable Diseases located in South Africa works on processing samples across Africa for poliomyelitis. There is an overwhelming amount of data to be processed and limited resources to do so rapidly and reliably. Put simply, the detection of the type of polio virus takes long and therefore the potential outbreaks can not be mitigated in time. This project aims to automate the polio surveillance workflow by improving the quality of data processed during the existing workflow. This will be accomplished by utilizing existing open source software and improving the observed shortcomings, with the intention of creating a workflow that will meet the standard of the NICD.