Disease Outbreaks and Surveillance
Definitions
* Resistance/Susceptibility: The ability of a person to defend themselves against the pathogenic processes of an organism
- Outbreak: same as epidemic, but in a smaller area
- Herd Immunity: A state where disease transmission is limited in the population due to a higher number of people being resistant to a disease (usually via vaccination)
- Pandemic: When an epidemic spread throughout the world
- Sentinel Case: The initial case, the first to be infected.
- Epidemic: An outbreak of disease that attacks many people at about the same time (and may spread through one or several communities)
- Cluster: This is a group of cases of a disease closely linked in time, place of occurrence, or both
- Endemic: The constant presence of a disease or infectious agent within a given geographic area or population group
Public Health Surveillance
How?
What?
Why?
- monitor health problems
- workable, uniform and continuous data collection methods; and
- Infectious and Non-infectious Disease
Types of Surveillance
- Active: There’s a specific collection of data from healthcare providers or institutions
- Sentinel: This is usually from a sample of health care providers, provides some indication of trends
- Passive: It depends on the discretion or whim of the healthcare provider, even where notification is required by law
- generate data for planning and resources allocation
- detect new risks and diseases (identify clusters/outbreaks)
- rapidity of collection, analysis, interpretation and dissemination of data
- practical, clear case definitions for each disease;
- Injury or Other Health Events
- Morbidity (Illness) and Mortality (Death)