Notifiable conditions reports: Technical notes

General

• All data is reported by date of disease onset, except mycobacterial diseases, adverse event following immunisation, acute post streptococcal glomerulonephritis, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, rheumatic heart disease, and HIV. Disease onset date is the date of onset of symptoms or the earliest laboratory specimen collection date; whichever is the earlier.
• Mycobacterial infections, adverse event following immunisation, acute post streptococcal glomerulonephritis, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and rheumatic heart disease are reported by the date notified to the Queensland Department of Health. For HIV, notifications are reported by specimen collection date.
• Reporting of newly acquired hepatitis C cases started in 2017, with cases identified back to the start of 2012. Prior to this all cases were notified as hepatitis C (unspecified). The number of newly acquired cases identified is an estimate.
• Testing for Zika virus infection in Queensland began in 2014 and as such there are no data reported for Zika before this.
• For some diseases, the number of cases reported in the most recent week will be incomplete because of time differences between onset of disease and test result availability. Data reported is therefore subject to change.
• Changes can occur in the number of notifications reported from week to week for some diseases. This is because of ongoing maintenance and update of notification details as new information becomes available, or where errors are detected through data quality assurance processes.
• For chlamydia and gonorrhoea, notifications from 1 January 2018 represent discrete individuals whereas notifications prior to that date represent infection site-specific positive results and may include more than one notification per individual.
• For chlamydia and gonorrhoea notifications from 29 January 2018, sexually trasmitted infections (STI) and no-sexually transmitted infections (non-STI) are reported separately.
• Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD) became notifiable in Queensland on 1 September 2018, therefore numbers do not appear before this date.
• Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) became notifiable in Queensland on 1 July 2021, therefore numbers do not appear before this date.
• Acute Post Streptococcal Glomerulonephritis (APSGN) ) became notifiable in Queensland on 20 October 2023, therefore numbers do not appear before this date.

Reports of weekly and annual data

• The weekly reporting period is from Monday to Sunday. The four weekly counts of notifications are shown as week commencing.
• Year to date (YTD) refers to all notifications from the start of the year up to and including the most recent Sunday.
• For annual reporting of notifiable conditions, complete year and YTD data is available for the previous 5 years.
• The ratio of YTD compared to YTD for previous 5 years is not calculated when the average YTD number of cases in the previous 5 years is less than 1.

Public Health Unit (PHU) / Hospital and Health Service (HHS) level data

• Notifiable communicable diseases are reported for 10 PHUs and 15 HHSs in Queensland.
• The boundaries of PHUs and HHSs are not exactly aligned. Some PHUs span across more than one HHS.
• Notifiable diseases are assigned to PHUs for public health follow-up at the time of notification for the majority of cases, based on the Queensland postcode of residence of the case.
• Reporting by HHS is based on the address and postcode of residence of notified cases. It is therefore a Queensland Department of Health organisational boundary that describes the number of cases reported in specific regions of Queensland.
• The postcode of residence of the case does not necessarily reflect where the infection was acquired. Numbers of cases reported at different regional levels should therefore be interpreted with caution.
• Not all diseases are assigned to PHUs for follow up, but they can be assigned to Hospital and Health Services for reporting purposes. This is particularly relevant for reports of syphilis, tuberculosis and HIV.