Types of Public Health Surveillance

Seeking to avoid pandemics, as well as disease outbreaks in general, public health agencies conduct a variety of health-related surveillance activities. The idea is to gather and analyze data related to human health and disease with the hope of providing early warnings of adverse health events and emerging disease outbreaks. This chapter focuses on epidemiologic surveillance. Epidemiologic surveillance has two main objectives: to enhance outbreak early event detection, that is, to identify the outbreak as quickly as possible, and to provide outbreak situational awareness, that is, an assessment of the extent of the situation. “Biosphere data” are divided into information about human, animal, and agricultural populations, and biosurveillance thus consists of health-related surveillance on each of these populations. More emphasis is being placed on establishing systems for zoonotic surveillance. Zoonotic surveillance could also be useful for the protection of animal food supplies from disease and wildlife conservation and preservation.