Syndromic surveillance is the gathering of data for public health purposes before laboratory or clinically confirmed information is available. Interest in syndromic surveillance has increased because of concerns about bioterrorism. In addition to bioterrorism detection, syndromic surveillance may be suited to detecting waterborne disease outbreaks. Theoretical benefits of syndromic surveillance...

The recent series of anthrax attacks has reinforced the importance of biosurveillance systems for the timely detection of epidemics. This paper describes a statistical framework for monitoring grocery data to detect a large-scale but localized bioterrorism attack. Our system illustrates the potential of data sources that may be more timely than traditional medical and public health data. The sy...