Preparation for, early detection of, and timely response to emerging
infectious diseases and epidemic outbreaks are a key public health priority
and are driving an emerging field of multidisciplinary research, infectious
disease informatics. As a critical component of this effort, public health
surveillance has been practiced for decades and continues to be an indispensable
approach for detecting emerging disease outbreaks and epidemics.
Although traditional disease surveillance often relies on time-consuming
laboratory diagnosis and the reporting of notifiable diseases is often slow
and incomplete, a new breed of public health surveillance systems has the
potential to significantly speed up detection of disease outbreaks. These new,
computer-based surveillance systems offer valuable and timely information
to hospitals as well as to state, local, and federal health officials. They are
capable of real-time or near real-time detection of serious illnesses and
potential bioterrorism agent exposures, allowing for a rapid public health
response. This public health surveillance approach is generally called
syndromic surveillance, which is defined as “an ongoing, systematic
collection, analysis, and interpretation of ‘syndrome’-specific data for early
detection of public health aberrations.”