Background: Surveillance is the backbone for effective public health practice. Traditionally, surveillance system relies on collection of information regarding health-related events through healthcare facilities, disease notification from physician, syndromic networks, selected sentinel or by event-based data. However, there are several limitations in using conventional surveillance. Met...

Mental health is an important aspect of public health after a disaster. This article describes what is known and what remains to be learned regarding the mental health impact of the January 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti. Public health surveillance efforts in Haiti and the United States in the first 2 months after the earthquake are described. Challenges in clinical assessment and public health ...

ver the past decade, local, state, and national public health agencies in the United States have, to varying degrees, started using electronic disease surveillance systems. Some systems rely on traditional reporting mechanisms, but others use automatically generated electronic clinical and nonclinical health-indicator data to discern unusual disease patterns in the community. In many instances,...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To describe the development of the public health surveillance system for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games; document its major findings; and discuss the implications for public health surveillance for future events. DESIGN Planning for the system took almost three years. Its major components included increased surveillance of communicable diseases; presentations to sentinel emerge...

INTRODUCTION When using emergency department (ED) data sets for public health surveillance, a standard approach is needed to define visits attributable to asthma. Asthma can be the first (primary) or a subsequent (2nd through 11th) diagnosis. Our study objective was to develop a definition of ED visits attributable to asthma for public health surveillance. We evaluated the effect of including v...

Public health surveillance is the ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of data on health-related events for use in public health action to reduce morbidity and mortality and to improve health (1). More simply put, surveillance is about translating information into action. In the United States, much of the focus of public health surveillance has traditional...

Public health surveillance has been defined as the ongoing systematic collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of data regarding a health-related event for use in public health action to reduce morbidity and mortality and to improve health. Surveillance is an essential element of public health program infrastructure. The desirable attributes of public health surveillance systems ...