  Dengue is a notifiable communicable disease in Sri Lanka since 1996. Dengue
fever spread rapidly among people living in most of the districts of Sri Lanka.
The present notification system of dengue communicable diseases which is
enforced by law is a passive surveillance system carried out by the public
health care professionals. The present notification of communicable disease
system is manual, slow, inefficient, and repetitive all of these lead to handle
the dengue related health problems ineffectively. Thus it is less effective in
preventing a spreading epidemic, public health care professionals and others
require an operational support system to help for managing day-to-day public
health responsibilities as well as a method to effectively detect and manage
health problems such as Dengue. On the other hand the Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) in medical world has been widely used. To give
the information technology touch, a complementary web based open source
software application environment has been developed with minimum implementation
and recurrent costs critical for developing countries like Sri Lanka and named
as eDCS: e Dengue Control System based on the same principles of manual disease
surveillance system while taking steps to provide timely, accurate information
in a reliable and useable manner. The eDCS helps to manage outbreaks through
early detection, rapid verification, and appropriate response to Dengue. It
allows health care professionals and citizens to get early awareness about the
dengue disease via Internet or mobile phone and bring them for performing
Dengue prevention and controlling operation through the social media
acceleration. The system is initially limited to dengue communicable disease.
It can be easily expanded to other communicable diseases, and non communicable
disease surveillance in future.
