Hi
Just to follow up on Jason’s info here (and to answer Knut): the background as to why WHO’s “epidemiological week” starts from a Sunday whereas ISO weeks starts on Monday is not easy to find, but I strongly suspect it was in practice adopted from or imposed by the US some 60-80 years ago. A lot of other standards of US origin, like the global use of UTM for mapping, were adopted in the first decades after WW2 when the US has scientific/economic dominance.
If you look at the attached document, you will see that with the exception of the start on Sunday versus Monday, the rest of the week definition is very similar to the ISO one. AND STATES (THIS CASE US) DO HAVE SOME LEEWAY WHEN CHOOSING EPI WEEKS.
In my opinion, other countries should just decide to utilise ISO weeks for disease surveillance, especially since most of them will have adopted ISO standards in all other sectors - all desktop calenders, personal diaries etc in most countries show weeks starting on Monday (and with software diaries you can change it under settings).
As long as it is a standard for that country, I cannot see that such a single-day shift will have any practical consequences… The US won’t, of course, but then Americans in general refuse to learn how to count to ten (still using inches, feet, yards, pounds, bushels and other non-metric standards) 
Best regards
Calle
MMWR_week_overview.pdf (65.6 KB)
···
On 10 April 2016 at 13:23, Jason Pickering jason.p.pickering@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Padam,
This question has come up a few times before. Basically, the issue is that other types of weekly schemes are not deterministic (much like the Nepali calendar). ISO weeks can be generated from an algorithm and are standard, but other week schemes may not be this deterministic. There are various other period generators as well for the client side apps which would also need to be taken into account.
Please have a look in dhis-2/dhis-api/src/main/java/org/hisp/dhis/period and you can see how the various period types are implemented. If you can submit a patch with the feature, I think this would be a good way to get this in, as it has been asked for several times.
Regards,
Jason
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On Sun, Apr 10, 2016 at 7:50 PM, Knut Staring knutst@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Padam,
This is not actually a bug, but a feature request (blueprint).
Can you provide some more info about these weekly periods - how do they differ from ISO weeks, and why?
Regards,
Knut
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Jason P. Pickering
email: jason.p.pickering@gmail.com
tel:+46764147049
On Sun, Apr 10, 2016 at 11:22 AM, Padam Dahal dahal0514@gmail.com wrote:
Public bug reported:
Customizing DHIS for Early Warning and Reporting System for Nepal. We
are using automatic aggregation to weekly dataset from event data items.
For the dataset, we need to use epidemiological weeks, which differs
from ISO weeks. So I am looking for some ways to fix the issue with the
week system.
Padam
** Affects: dhis2
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
–
You received this bug notification because you are a member of DHIS 2
developers, which is subscribed to DHIS.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1568472
Title:
Epidemiological weekly periods [other than ISO weeks]
Status in DHIS:
New
Bug description:
Customizing DHIS for Early Warning and Reporting System for Nepal. We
are using automatic aggregation to weekly dataset from event data
items. For the dataset, we need to use epidemiological weeks, which
differs from ISO weeks. So I am looking for some ways to fix the issue
with the week system.
Padam
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Knut Staring
Dept. of Informatics, University of Oslo
Norway: +4791880522
Skype: knutstar
http://dhis2.org
–
Calle Hedberg
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