Disease Investigations Performed by the Sedgwick County Health Department Epidemiology Program

The Sedgwick County Health Department (SCHD) investigates reports of notifiable infectious diseases in the county. Notifiable diseases are conditions of public health importance that are required by law to be reported by laboratories and medical providers.

The Epidemiology Program at the Sedgwick County Health Department investigates all notifiable diseases except tuberculosis and sexually transmitted infections, which are managed by other programs in the health department.

The graph on the SCHD website shows the number of investigations performed by Sedgwick County Epidemiologists each week. See the box below to determine what diseases are represented in the graph.

Selected Notifiable Diseases by Category of How They are Spread (Common Route of Transmission)*

Blood: hepatitis B**, hepatitis C**

Contaminated Food or Water: amebiasis, cholera, campylobacteriosis, giardiasis, hepatitis A, legionellosis, listeriosis, salmonellosis, Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli, shigellosis, typhoid fever

Respiratory (cough, sneeze): Haemophilus influenzae invasive disease, measles, mumps, pertussis (whooping cough), rabies, rubella, Streptococcus pneumoniae invasive disease, varicella (chickenpox)

Vector (tick, mosquito): anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, dengue fever, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS), Lyme disease, malaria, Q fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tularemia, West Nile virus.

*See http://www.kdheks.gov/epi/disease_investigation_guidelines.htm for a complete list of notifiable diseases and more information about each disease.
**Hepatitis investigations include past or recent infection. Most cases investigated are people who test positive for hepatitis but have no symptoms.

A subset of the investigations shown on the SCHD website will be cases that meet certain standardized public health definitions. The subset was published by county by the Bureau of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment through June 2020. (https://www.kdhe.ks.gov/Archive.aspx?AMID=87).

National provisional case counts are published in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report tables at https://wonder.cdc.gov/nndss/nndss_weekly_tables_menu.asp?mmwr_year=&mmwr_week=.

Case Definitions are found at https://ndc.services.cdc.gov/.

Rev. 5/24