The
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
National Biosurveillance Strategy is the plan to implement a
biosurveillance Biosurveillance is an aspect of biodefense relating to the detection of biological threats, including bioterrorist threats.
BioWatch BioWatch is a United States federal government program to detect the release of pathogens into the air as part of a ...
system that will monitor and interpret data that might relate to disease activity and threats to human or animal health – whether infectious, toxic, metabolic, and regardless of intentional or natural origin – in order to achieve early warning of health threats, early detection of health events and overall
situational awareness
Situational awareness or situation awareness (SA) is the perception of environmental elements and events with respect to time or space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their future status. An alternative definition is tha ...
of disease activity.
[ Bush, George W. "Homeland Security Presidential Directive." National Security Presidential Directives (2001).]
Types of data collection
It is debated whether is it better to engage in a “more data, faster is better” approach or whether it would be more effective to pursue fewer but more meaningful data streams. Some of the things that will be monitored are counts of clinical diagnoses, sales of over-the-counter remedies, and school absentees among select age groups.
Proposed plan
The
Department of Homeland Security
The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is the U.S. federal executive department responsible for public security, roughly comparable to the interior or home ministries of other countries. Its stated missions involve anti-terr ...
laid out the plan for the national biosurveillance system. They stated that an effect surveillance system relies on five key principles that are generally applied to public health and medical preparedness. The first is being prepared for all potential catastrophic health events; the second is having vertical and horizontal coordination among all levels of government; the third is having a regional approach to health preparedness; the fourth is the engagement of the private sector, academia, and other nongovernmental entities; the fifth is the important roles of individuals, families, and communities. The biosurveillance program must be nationwide, robust, and integrated with international disease systems in order to provide early warning and ongoing characterization of disease outbreaks in real-time.
[Bush, George W. The national security strategy of the United States of America. Wordclay, 2009.] The system must be sufficiently able to identify a specific disease and its prevalence in varying populations and environments and must be able to tailor the analysis to new diseases.
The system should create a networked system to allow for two-way information flow between and among Federal, State, and local government public health authorities and clinical health care providers.
The system shall build upon existing Federal, State, and local surveillance systems where they exists and should enable and provide incentive for public health agencies to implement surveillance systems where they do not exist.
See also
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Disease surveillance
Disease surveillance is an epidemiological practice by which the spread of disease is monitored in order to establish patterns of progression. The main role of disease surveillance is to predict, observe, and minimize the harm caused by outbreak, ...
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Public health surveillance Public health surveillance (also epidemiological surveillance, clinical surveillance or syndromic surveillance) is, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), "the continuous, systematic collection, analysis and interpretation of health-relat ...
References
{{U.S. biological defense
Surveillance
Medical monitoring
Disaster preparedness