Introduction MUse will make EHR data increasingly available for public health surveillance. For Stage 2, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) regulations will require hospitals and offer an option for eligible professionals to provide electronic syndromic surveillance data to public health. Together, these data can strengthen public health surveillance capabilities and population ...

Sir Robert Watson-Watt, who developed early warning radar in Britain during WorldWar II to counter the rapid growth of the Luftwaffe, proposed a “cult of the imperfect,” which he stated as “Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes” (Brown 1999). Just as imperfect radar detected incoming German aircraft to protect British citizens, imperfect pu...

There is a need for a coordinated, sustainable, in-service, training programme in surveillance and other public health activities. This should be available for all levels of health personal throughout the Pacific. The model advocates continuing education and in-service training that immediately and directly enhances surveillance. Specific educational objectives for surveillance should be based ...

BACKGROUND Public health surveillance is not ethically neutral and yet, ethics guidance and training for surveillance programmes is sparse. Development of ethics guidance should be based on comprehensive and transparently derived overviews of ethical issues and arguments. However, existing overviews on surveillance ethics are limited in scope and in how transparently they derived their results....

Routine vaccinations of US military personnel with Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed began in 1998. To systematically identify clinical diagnoses reported more frequently after vaccination than before, all military personnel were retrospectively assigned to pre- or post-vaccination cohorts. Cohort assignments were based on vaccination statuses each day of the 3-year surveillance period. For each cohort,...