Innovations in Disease Surveillance and Monitoring

Abstract

While there have been worldwide improvements in public health over the past few decades, new viruses and other pandemics are expected to increase as we move towards high-density, urban living. But with only 49 countries reporting high-quality cause of death data to the WHO, the exact burden of infectious diseases is impossible to know. As made clear by the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a vital need for identifying and monitoring the spread of new infectious diseases. Novel sources of data offer the opportunity to expand the geographic scope and timeliness of surveillance activities. This chapter reviews six new health surveillance approaches, such as syndromic data collection, as well as three other novel data collection methods, such as movement tracking using telecommunications data, that have the potential to offer useful health insights. However, most of these methods are in their comparative infancy and need rigorous testing and investment before a pandemic strikes so that countries are not left scrambling to innovate during a crisis period. Particularly important is that countries aim to establish an inclusive national data infrastructure, which fosters third party partnerships and innovation, with epidemic intelligence as core objective of that system. The focus should be data-driven and evidence-based decision-making during crisis periods as well as day-to-day policy-making.