Infectious disease surveillance in the US and the UK: from public goods to the challenges of new technologies

Infectious diseases are a long-standing and continuing threat to health and welfare, with their containment dependent on national disease surveillance and response capacities. This article discusses infectious disease surveillance in the US and the UK, examining historical national traditions for identifying and controlling infectious disease risks and how globalization and technical advances have influenced the evolution of their respective approaches. The two systems developed in different but parallel ways. In the US, surveillance remained quite localized at the state level until the early twentieth century and still retains many of those features. The UK approach became centralized from the latter part of the nineteenth century and has principally remained so. In both cases, disease surveillance was traditionally conceived as a public good, where national or local authorities held sovereign rights and power to protect public health. With the increasing globalized nature of infectious disease, such notions shifted toward surveillance as a global public good, with countries responding in turn through the creation of new global health governance arrangements and regulations . . . [!!!!SEE PAPER!!!!!]