New Ways to Disseminate the US National Notifiable Disease Provisional Data

Introduction The NNDSS is a nationwide collaboration that enables all levels of public health (local, state, territorial, federal and international) to monitor, control, and prevent the occurrence and spread of statereportable and nationally notifiable diseases and conditions. The NNDSS data are a critical source of information for monitoring disease trends, effectiveness of prevention and control programs, and policy development. To provide timely NNDSS data, state and territorial health departments voluntarily report notifiable disease incidence data to CDC when they become aware of these cases and as per recommended national notification timeframes. These provisional data are published each week in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). Great strides have been made exploring and exploiting new and different sources of disease surveillance data and developing robust statistical methods for analyzing the collected data (1). However, there have been fewer efforts in the area of online dissemination of surveillance data. Appropriate dissemination of surveillance data is important to maximize the utility of collected data (2).