ABSTRACT
Disease surveillance systems collect and monitor data for disease trends and outbreaks so that public health personnel can protect global health. Medical surveillance is the monitoring of diseases or indicators of the health of the public, including symptoms indicating an act of bioterrorism, by epidemiologists and public health professionals. The World Health Organization (WHO) more specifically defines epidemic intelligence as the systemic ongoing collection, collation, and analysis of data for public health purposes, and the timely dissemination of public health information for assessment and public health response as necessary. Medical surveillance comes in many forms, from the highly structured to the syndromic to the informal. Sources of data that are routinely used as part of public health surveillance initiatives include; reportable (notifiable) disease systems, laboratory data, vital registries, sentinel surveillance systems, syndrome registries (birth defect registries), disease specific surveys (such as population based surveys like HANES or provider-based surveys like the national hospital discharge survey), administrative data sources, in addition to other sources such as vaccine monitoring systems. The broad categories include sentinel, laboratory, electronic, and public health, but there are many classification types of surveillance, including:
• active vs. passive; • overt vs. covert; • mass vs. targeted; • local vs. global; • disease-specific vs. syndromic; • voluntary vs. mandated; • animal vs. human; • scientific data-based vs. politically motivated; • integrated vs. unidimensional.
