Development of these tools was motivated by concerns over bioterrorism, and by the global SARS outbreak in early 2003, but they have a wide range of potential uses in population health epidemiology, in disease outbreak investigation and management, and in other areas of public health practice (including management of public health problems in post-disaster situtaions).
Currently the tools are functional but lack important features and require more testing (and more unit and functional tests) before they can be used routinely. It is hoped the the tools can be brought to "production-ready" status during 2005.
The main tools are:
- NetEpi Case Manager: this is a tool for securely collecting structured information about cases and contacts of diseases (and other conditions) of public health importance, through Web browsers and the Internet. New data collection forms can be designed and deployed quickly by epidemiologists, using a "point-and-click" interface, without the need for knowledge of or training in any programming language (not even Python). Data can then be collected from users of the system, who can be located anywhere in the world, into a centralised database. All that is needed by users of the system is a relatively recent Web browser and an Internet connection. In some respects, NetEpi Case Manager is like a Web-enabled version of the data entry facilities in the very popular Epi Info suite of programmes provided in various forms since the mid-1980s by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, NetEpi Case Manager aims to provide additional facilties to make it easier to administer a rapidly-deployable, widely-distributed data collection system which can scale to handle hundreds of thousands of cases and contacts if required.
- NetEpi Analysis: this is a tool for conducting epidemiological analysis of data sets, both large and small, either through a Web browser interface, or via a Pythonic programmatic interface. In some respects it is similar to the analysis facilities included in Epi Info, except that NetEpi Analysis is primarily designed to be installed on servers and accessed remotely via Web browsers (or other remote procedure call or web service mechanisms), rather than being installed on individual desktop or laptop computers (although it can and does run nicely on Linux and Apple Mac OS X desktops and laptops, and on Microsoft Windows machines in future versions).
Contributions by experienced Python programmers to the further development of these tools are welcome - please use the mailing list (details on the project home page at http://www.netepi.org) for initial contact.
Also many thanks to the Python development team, and to the developers of the various Python packages which these tools make use of - particularly the Albatross web application framework, the eGenix MxDateTime module, the pyPGSQL DB-API package, Numeric Python, and the RPy package which interfaces Python with R (and thanks to the R development team for the R statsistics package, of course).
Tim C Sydney, Australia -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
