Intro
"What gets measured gets done." —Anonymous
Public health surveillance is the ongoing systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, closely integrated with the timely dissemination of these data to those responsible for preventing and controlling disease and injury (Thacker and Berkelman 1988). Public health surveillance is a tool to estimate the health status and behavior of the populations served by ministries of health, ministries of finance, and donors. Because surveillance can directly measure what is going on in the population, it is useful both for measuring the need for interventions and for directly measuring the effects of interventions. The purpose of surveillance is to empower decision makers to lead and manage more effectively by providing timely, useful evidence.
Increasingly, top managers in ministries of health and finance in developing countries and donor agencies are recognizing that data from effective surveillance systems are useful for targeting resources and evaluating programs. The HIV and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemics underscored the critical role of surveillance in protecting individual nations and the global community. For example, in 2005, China rapidly began to expand its surveillance and response capacity through its Field Epidemiology Training Program (FETP); Brazil and Argentina chose to use World Bank loans to develop surveillance capacity; and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) redesigned its surveillance strategy to focus on the use of data to improve public health interventions (USAID 2005). Additionally, the guidelines for implementing the 2004 draft revised International Health Regulations require World Health Organization (WHO) member states to have key persons and core capacities in surveillance (http://www.who.int/csr/ihr/howtheywork/faq/en/#draft).
Just as decision makers require competent, motivated economists to provide quality technical analyses, they also need competent staff members to provide scientifically valid surveillance information and communicate the results as information for action. Competent epidemiologists and surveillance staff members are not a luxury in developing countries; they are a necessity for rational planning, implementation, and intervention (Narasimhan and others 2004).
