Public Health Surveillance for Infectious Diseases

This chapter describes the application of specific principles to the practice of surveillance of infectious diseases. It describes how both well-established and novel aspects of infectious pathogens make surveillance challenging and important. It describes the impact of changes in human contact with pathogens have resulting from human intrusion into uninhabited environments, increasing and rapid global travel, and international food trade. It argues for better integration of public health surveillance systems across the globe using standardized case definitions, careful data integration, well-established communication pathways, and systems that capture both animal reservoirs and vectors of human infections.