Public health surveillance - Topics

Why nursing home residents are missing from most infection statistics What makes valley fever so common in the American Southwest? What are the rules for reporting suspicious disease clusters? Why do viral diseases hit some populations much harder than others? Why some countries screen arriving passengers for fever How do wastewater surveys spot a viral outbreak before hospitals do? How diseases are tracked in wild animal populations What exactly is a sentinel surveillance site and how are those sites chosen? What is the real difference between active and passive surveillance? What is the role of the ECDC compared with the CDC? Why are mortality surveillance systems always weeks behind case counts? Why do national health indicators get revised years after the data was collected? Reporting mandates for hospital infection rates and what actually gets published Many counties still type lab results in by hand years after electronic reporting went live The indicator dashboard looked great until we noticed three districts had flat-lined Syndromic surveillance picked up the flu wave two weeks before lab confirmations did Who decides which diseases go on the nationally notifiable list? What happens to a tuberculosis report after the patient moves to another state? Some state health departments still exchange TB lab results by fax and phone call How do you measure whether a surveillance system is actually any good? Do national immunization coverage surveys ever cross-check against clinic registers? Opioid overdose deaths are called an epidemic but the surveillance looks nothing like cholera How quickly do notifiable disease reports actually reach the CDC from a local clinic? Every pandemic ends with an argument about who counted the deaths correctly The last natural smallpox case in Somalia and how it was confirmed Seroprevalence surveys and what population antibody data cannot say What qualifies a disease as eradicated rather than merely eliminated How eradication is verified in places with no reliable laboratory testing What it takes to certify a country polio-free Countries self-report their IHR core capacities and nobody verifies them Who owns the data that hospitals hand over to state health departments? Why did it take weeks to declare a public health emergency of international concern?