ABSTRACT
Disease surveillance in emerging infectious disease hotspot regions of the world is essential to early disease detection and pandemic disease prevention. Surveillance for emerging infectious diseases in human and animal populations is a global health imperative and represents an enormous challenge to government authorities, particularly in resource-limited settings. The purpose of a public health surveillance system is to ensure that problems of public health importance are monitored and managed efficiently and effectively and to be able to respond quickly to public health threats. One challenge of being able to conduct consistent surveillance is variance in case reporting due to a lack of standardized case definitions of certain reportable or neglected tropical diseases. Surveillance systems require extensive and regular funding to maintain consistent data, and often such systems are difficult to sustain in resource-limited settings. In order for surveillance networks to work, stakeholders must be engaged and take advocacy roles from the beginning of the effort.
