Biosurveillance for infectious diseases is a field in evolution. The anthrax attacks of 2001 called attention to the need for early warning systems for terrorist attacks, and the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic underscored the need for tracking syndromic patterns. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention established BioSense in 2004 to monitor national health data and to provide federal, sta...

1Division of Health Informatics and Surveillance, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, Atlanta, GA, USA; 2Communicable Disease Epidemiology & Immunizations Section, Public Health – Seattle & King County, Seattle, WA, USA; 3Division of Integrated Biosurveillance, Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, Baltimore, MD, USA; 4International Society of Disease Surveillance, Brighton, MA, USA; 5...

Event-based biosurveillance is a recognized approach to early warning and situational awareness of emerging health threats. In this study, we build upon previous human and animal health work to develop a new approach to plant pest and pathogen surveillance. We show that monitoring public domain electronic media for indications and warning of epidemics and associated social disruption can provid...

by gest on Jauary 5, 2016 ht://jam ia.oxfournals.org/ D ow nladed from The emergence of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s catapulted the Internet from a curiosity for computer scientists, engineers, and experimenters testing data interchange technologies into a vast, dynamic, and unprecedented information resource that has fundamentally transformed science, society, and human communications...

Current biosurveillance relies on classical statistical control charts for detecting disease outbreaks. However, these are not always suitable in this context. Assumptions of normality, independence, and stationarity are typically violated in syndromic data. Furthermore, outbreak signatures in such data are of unknown patterns, and therefore call for “general detectors”. We propose wavelet-base...