CoughWatchSA is a participatory surveillance program developed by the Centre for Respiratory Diseases and Meningitis from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases. Our aim is to conduct surveillance for communicable respiratory diseases within South Africa in order to provide data on the burden, severity and seasonality.

Our mission is to develop a real-time surveillance program for non-medically attended cases of influenza-like illness (ILI) as reported by members of the community. We want to systematically collect data on health-seeking behaviour, vaccination coverage and trends of reported suspected cases of ILI. In so doing, we hope to develop an early warning system for identifying suspected cases of ILI directly from the community, without needing a visit to a clinic or hospital. Our data will complement existing facility-based surveillance programs to better understand the broader community burden of respiratory illness.