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

  1. Active: There’s a specific collection of data from healthcare providers or institutions
  1. Sentinel: This is usually from a sample of health care providers, provides some indication of trends
  1. 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)