DISEASE MONITORING AND SURVEILLANCE

Public health organizations strive to reduce the impact of infectious diseases and therefore to reduce the morbidity and mortality associated with these diseases. The foundation of public health surveillance and disease control lies primarily on effective communicable disease reporting and secondarily on analysis of surveillance data and integration with decision support. Public health surveillance is important in maintaining a baseline reference of endemic diseases (whose presence is constant within a certain geographic area or population) and for rapidly identifying epidemic diseases (that spread rapidly in a particular geographic area or among a particular population). There are two types of surveillance: passive surveillance, where clinicians and laboratories report information to public health organizations, and active surveillance, where the public health organization takes direct action in collecting the information.