Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Program

Disease Detection and Investigation
Use these resources to develop tools specific to enhancement and improvement of disease detection and surveillance during a public health emergency.

Surveillance Systems

		An Educational Sheet: Monitoring Community Health Status for Emergency Preparedness This is a four-page educational guide targeting epidemiologists, disease control and emergency preparedness directors, and information technology professionals on the importance of disease surveillance and the need for the right tools to help assess data accurately and in a timely manner.

		MMWR Article on a Framework for Syndromic Surveillance Syndromic surveillance systems are becoming increasingly common in health departments. These systems represent a substantial improvement in the timeliness of ascertainment of community health status. For the value of such systems to be realized, protocols are needed for review and analysis of the findings that these systems produce. Establishment of a framework for evaluation and response to syndromic surveillance data will facilitate the implementation of these systems and standardization of procedures for validation of system findings. Careful development of an evaluation and response framework should be undertaken to assess whether use of syndromic surveillance systems requires excess work to distinguish between statistical anomalies and important public health events.This paper, Syndromic Surveillance on the Epidemiologist's Desktop: Making Sense of Much Data puts forward recommendations for such frameworks.
Outbreak Investigation
		An Educational Sheet: Preparing for Outbreak Investigations This is an educational guide for local public health agencies to help outline issues in preparing staff for outbreak investigations.