BIOSURVEILLANCE
T ME I
n the United States biosurveillance began in earnest during the late 1990s, through the increasing desire by state and federal health offi cials to use readily available electronic data to enhance existing passive disease
surveillance methods, and to attempt to fully co-ordinate and share this data. Although some of these early eff orts were productive in discovering both individual cases of disease and disease outbreaks that may not have otherwise been recognized, the use of best practices in biological agent and disease detection, along with the overall coordination of this surveillance, remained incomplete. The events of 9/11 put an immediate and continuing pressure upon the government to attempt to solve these considerable problems. Given the varied success of
is of the essence Col. Zygmunt Dembek examines 21st-century biosurveillance
Timely and accurate biological pathogen and disease surveillance - the monitoring of health data to discover and manage disease outbreaks - is crucial to modern civilization. A potentially deadly international infl uenza or SARS-like pandemic could disrupt the health and well-being of millions worldwide. Therefore, our societies need to invest in the best biosurveillance systems attainable. Where are we with respect to attaining this goal now?
these eff orts, it is worth reviewing the diff erent types of biosurveillance systems now in use.
Detection & Identifi cation Key overall categories of biosurveillance include pathogen and disease detection, and confi rmatory identifi cation. Disease detection through individual illness reporting is a time-honoured method of the public health response to an outbreak. This is traditionally accomplished via a physician’s diagnosis of illness (clinical identifi cation), or a clinical laboratory pathogen fi nding from a clinical specimen collected from an ill patient (laboratory confi rmation). National data collection eff orts have
enhanced both the positive characterization and speed of reporting of clinical laboratory
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