In recent years, biosurveillance has become the buzzword under which a diverse set of ideas and activities regarding detecting and mitigating biological threats are incorporated depending on context and perspective. Increasingly, biosurveillance practice has become global and interdisciplinary, requiring information and resources across public health, One Health, and biothreat domains. Even wit...

Biosurveillance, a relatively young field, has recently increased in importance because of its relevance to national security and global health. Databases and tools describing particular subsets of disease are becoming increasingly common in the field. However, a common method to describe those diseases is lacking. Here, we present the Anthology of Biosurveillance Diseases (ABD), an ontology of...

In the context of the 2012 National Strategy for Biosurveillance, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) asked the Department of Defense (DoD) to review its biosurveillance programs, prioritize missions and desired outcomes, evaluate how DoD programs contribute to these, and assess the appropriateness and stability of the department's funding system for biosurveillance. DoD sought external a...

Event-based biosurveillance is a scientific discipline in which diverse sources of data, many of which are available from the Internet, are characterized prospectively to provide information on infectious disease events. Biosurveillance complements traditional public health surveillance to provide both early warning of infectious disease events and situational awareness. The Global Health Secur...

Introduction The National Strategy for Biosurveillance promotes a national effort to improve early detection and enable ongoing situational awareness of all-hazards threats. Implicit in the Strategy’s implementation plan is the need to upgrade capabilities and integrate multiple disparate data sources, including more complete electronic health record (EHR) data into future biosurveillance capab...

Introduction The 2012 National Strategy for Biosurveillance1 calls for improved integration, synchronization, and coordination of national biosurveillance activities and acknowledges the benefits of collective knowledge through sharing and receiving of biosurveillance information via strengthened partnerships amongst international, federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, private sector, non...

Introduction Telephone triage is a relatively new data source available to biosurveillance systems.1-2 Because early detection and warning is a high priority, many biosurveillance systems have begun to collect and analyze data from non-traditional sources [absenteeism records, overthe-counter drug sales, electronic laboratory reporting, internet searches (e.g. Google Flu Trends) and TT]. These ...

Methods NBIC engaged the biosurveillance community within and beyond the federal government through a series of extensive discussions, workshops, and symposia to define a strategy for future development of integrated biosurveillance activities grounded in legislative and presidential direction. The NBIC Strategic Plan was extensively reviewed by the twelve federal Departments that comprise the ...

Motivated by the threat of bioterrorism, biosurveillance / syndromic surveillance systems are now in crisis: with the original purpose of early detection, and more than 10 years in existence, no health department has reported using them for this purpose. This has led to a shift away from only early detection of bioterrorist attacks. The goal has been expanded in two directions: firstly, to incl...

Biosurveillance, a relatively young field, has recently increased in importance because of increasing emphasis on global health. Databases and tools describing particular subsets of disease are becoming increasingly common in the field. Here, we present an infectious disease database that includes diseases of biosurveillance relevance and an extensible framework for the easy expansion of the da...