Surveillance and Early Warning on Public Health Risk

As the discipline of public health continues to evolve, the concept of public health surveillance is also being refined. The academic community generally agrees that public health surveillance refers to the process of long-term, continuous, and systematic collection of public health data related to the promotion of population health, the acquirement of important public health information after analyzing and interpreting the data obtained, and the timely feedback of the information to all those who should be informed so as to guide the formulation, refinement, and evaluation of public health measures and strategies. Early public health surveillance mainly involved the observation of the occurrence and mortality of diseases, hence the term disease surveillance. However, as the scope of surveillance expanded, it was referred to as epidemiological surveillance. Nowadays, it is generally known as public health surveillance. The earliest disease surveillance activities originated from the monitoring of infectious diseases, but with the transformation in the disease spectrum and modern medical model, the range of objects monitored has been continuously expanding, from infectious diseases primarily to many aspects including chronic diseases, injuries, occupational factors, personal behavior, and sudden public health events.