The potential value of crowdsourced surveillance systems in supplementing sentinel influenza networks: the case of France

International audienceInfluenza surveillance systems aim to annually track influenza epidemics, detecting their start, monitoring their spatio-temporal spread, identifying populations at risk and circulating viruses, and estimating the impact on the community and healthcare structures [1]. Sentinel surveillance systems are based on primary care and report the weekly number of patients examined with influenza-related illness. Recently, a variety of non-traditional surveillance approaches have emerged [ 2-9] where large amounts of crowdsourced digital data produced by individuals enable such indi-viduals to contribute to monitoring the health of their community and to provide authorities with additional characterisations of the epidemic. In the European Union, more than one third of the countries run a participatory surveillance system to monitor influenza epidemics, under the standardised framework of the Influenzanet network established in 2011 [2,10,11]. The Influenzanet network is a syndromic surveillance system based on voluntary self-reporting of symptoms by participants residing in countries, which are part of the Influenzanet