Global Health Surveillance—Guest Editor’s Introduction

648 boundaries, and globalization has connected people and parts of the world today more than in any other time in our history. Social and mainstream media can amplify these fears. Many of us have the ability to search the Internet to find more information on a new disease than we can possibly comprehend and to see the ample chatter on social media sites. Fortunately, the World Health Organization (WHO) sets requirements for member countries to report certain diseases. Before the severe acute respiratory syndrome INTRODUCTION People are particularly fearful of a pandemic caused by the global spread of a novel naturally occurring disease such as Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus or a pandemic influenza A strain. This fear is understandable given that novel diseases represent the unknown: How quickly and easily does the disease spread from person to person? Who is most susceptible to the disease? What is the likelihood that I or my family will die from the disease if we contract it? These fears are not unfounded, as infectious diseases know no geographic mproving the overall health of a given population has far-reaching effects not only on the economy and stability of that particular population but also on a global scale. Disease surveillance, a critical component in understanding and improving global health, is undergoing a revolution driven by advances in information technology. Recent years have seen vast improvements in the collection, analysis, visualization, and reporting of public health data. At the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), teams of software engineers, analysts, and epidemiologists have been working for more than 15 years to develop advanced electronic disease surveillance technologies. This issue of the Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest describes the development and implementation of these technologies, the process and challenges of making the tools open source, and potential new analytic models for early detection of disease outbreak. Global Health Surveillance—Guest Editor’s Introduction