ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief background discussion of global health security and the millennial preoccupation – in the global north – with emerging infectious disease. It considers several touchstones for research into event-oriented public health monitoring and crisis management, by deploying the analytic framework developed in French and Mykhalovskiy. Sudden-onset events contain in their abrupt manifestation the trigger for verification and assessment. The chapter reviews the event as a key, active concept and considers the forms of knowledge, diverse informants, and organizational initiatives that discourse organized by this concept presupposes. It deals with a discussion of some of the wider implications of the emergent kind of governance. The chapter discusses the touchstones with reference to big data technologies, public health event-detection, and crisis management. This relates to: active concepts, forms of knowledge, diverse informants and organizational initiatives. The orientation of public health monitoring toward events implies a transformation in the forms of knowledge that public health organizations and professionals need.
