ABSTRACT
Successful outbreak detection requires the accurate identication of the moment when the number of cases has exceeded the number of expected for a certain period or geographic region (Lemay et al. 2008). New surveillance methods are being developed and tested to improve the timeliness of disease outbreak detection. One promising set of approaches is known as biosurveillance, wherein various information preceding rm clinical diagnoses of health events is captured early and rapidly from existing, usually electronic, data sources, and analyzed frequently to detect signals that might indicate an outbreak (Hopkins et al. 2003).
