Supervising Section Editor: Sean O. Henderson, MD Submission history: Submitted April 01, 2012; Accepted April 16, 2012 Full text available through open access at http://escholarship.org/uc/uciem_westjem DOI: 10.5811/westjem.2012.4.12292 [West J Emerg Med. 2012;13(6):494] Shankar LeVine, MD Caitlin Bailey, MD Arun Nagdev, MD Alameda County Medical Center, Department of Emergency Medicine, Oakla...

So we did what we usually do, approach understanding clumsily, not knowing if such a complaint could ever be resolved, or how, or to whose satisfaction, or the child’s wishes, with so little help to offer, recording an uncertain prognosis, so awkward to translate, entering the clinical elements anyway, using terms that burnish our bronzed mode of medical thinking, closing our eyes, trying to co...

yndromic surveillance, a medical surveillance approach that bins data into broadly defi ned syndrome groups, has drawn increasing interest in recent years for the early detection of disease outbreaks for both public health and bioterrorism defense. Emergency department chief complaint records are an attractive data source for syndromic surveillance owing to their timeliness and ready availabili...