Editorial

Abstract

Public health surveillance can be defined as the ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of data that relates to a health-related event in order to reduce morbidity and mortality as well as to improve health.
Surveillance is undertaken to inform disease prevention and control measures, as data disseminated by a public health surveillance system can be used for immediate public health action, programme planning and evaluation, and formulating research
hypotheses. According to the definition of the WHO, an effective surveillance system has the following functions:
• detection and notification of health events
• collection and consolidation of pertinent data
• investigation and confirmation (epidemiological, clinical and/or laboratory) of
cases or outbreaks
• routine analysis and creation of reports
• feedback of information to those providing the data
• feed-forward (i.e. the forwarding of data to more central levels).
• reporting data to the next administrative level.