Active and passive surveillance are two basic types of surveillance used to track cases of risk factors, medical conditions, cases of diseases, adverse events, etc. While active surveillance, such as the use of a Remote Surveillance Trailer in Redwood City CA, aims to detect all cases, passive surveillance is likely to miss cases due to the reporting structure. Despite its comprehensiveness, active surveillance requires significant human and financial resources, making passive surveillance a more commonly implemented option. Surveillance is an important process or system for tracking the incidence of a disease or the side effects of drugs or vaccines. Passive surveillance is the collection of data from those who voluntarily report it, such as hospitals, healthcare providers, parents, or health departments.
Active surveillance involves actively searching for cases, either through a notification system or through a systematic protocol, such as calling all health departments in a region during a disease outbreak. An active surveillance system is one in which public health officials periodically request reports on diseases. This is often done by regularly calling (daily, weekly, or biweekly) selected individuals, usually doctors, infection control professionals in hospitals, laboratories, schools, urgent care clinics, etc., and asking them if specific diseases have been detected. This type of system has been shown to double the number of complaints of some diseases.
Active surveillance is also used during outbreak investigations. Public health surveillance is what represents the first phase of the general approach to public health. It is a system for collecting patient records and data that helps in the study of infectious diseases. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the CDC are the two main agencies that use this type of system; however, there are other public health institutions that collect data from state and local health departments for analysis and interpretation. Public health surveillance is divided into two main categories: passive and active. Passive surveillance is the status quo of public health surveillance.
It is ongoing and is not linked to any specific research or to a large scale public health threat. In passive surveillance, the health care provider takes the initiative to file a report following a list of notifiable diseases published by their state's health department. A health agency waits for these reports to be submitted and collects the data to study them. and analyze them.
Passive surveillance is simple and inexpensive, but it's also less comprehensive than active surveillance. When responding to these types of inquiries, the process, methods and objectives of data collection are defined. In addition, the World Health Organization (WHO) maintains an internationally notifiable list of diseases, which serves as a guide for data collection efforts. This list includes, but is not limited to, smallpox, polio, and new subtypes of influenza.
Public health surveillance, although complex, is essential to provide reliable and critical information related to diseases and viruses to appropriate parties. What the CDC and the World Health Organization do with this public health information ultimately serves to create a response to problems such as COVID-19, HIV and other major public health threats. World Health Organization, World Health Organization for Disease Surveillance, Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS), World Health Organization, World Health Organization for Emergency Surveillance, WHO Global Surveillance and Monitoring System. As a district or subnational administrator, it's important to know the difference between the three main types of surveillance methods, as each requires different personnel, procedures, and resources.
Passive surveillance is useful for looking for patterns or “signs”, such as a group of cases of illness or a higher-than-expected report of side effects with a medication. Disease records, vital statistics data, annual health surveys, and administrative data systems (for example, hospital discharge data) are sources that have been used to monitor health conditions. Examples of diseases being monitored include the flu, COVID-19 and its variants, HIV, AIDS, and whooping cough. However, the economic evaluation of laboratory surveillance systems to detect specific pathogenic organisms has been carried out in the developed world comparing current and future benefits and costs (Elbasha, Fitzsimmons and Meltzer 2000).
Unfortunately, most developing countries have limited surveillance systems for non-infectious diseases; instead, existing data systems (for example, vital records, car accident records, or insurance claims data) are potential sources of surveillance data. Since most surveillance systems rely on passive notification of diseases by healthcare providers, it's inevitable that they are not properly reported. Institutions that oversee public health use databases and automated electronic notification systems that effectively track, monitor and collect data related to specific diseases. The success of this global effort to control the first new epidemic disease of the 21st century depended on a combination of open collaboration between scientists and politicians from many countries and on the rapid and accurate communication of surveillance data within and between countries. Developing countries share surveillance needs with the rest of the world, but face the challenge of economic constraints, weak public health infrastructure, and the overwhelming challenges of poverty and disease.
It must be located in a safe area where disease control personnel work and must not be accessible to the public. Reportedly, developing countries are the weak link in the global surveillance framework, although they bear the greatest burden of disease, old emerging and reemerging pathogens, and drug-resistant pathogens (U.) A subcategory of passive surveillance is “enhanced passive surveillance,” in which the organization receiving the data works closely with healthcare providers and laboratories most likely to report a particular disease or group of diseases and establishes systems to increase the timeliness and completeness of reporting. These basic surveillance tools must be robust before new types of data can be considered to complement public health surveillance. Other questions include how to design and maintain surveillance systems for these problems, especially morbidity systems for chronic diseases. The evaluation of existing national surveillance and response activities provides baseline data to measure progress; identify and build consensus on national priority communicable diseases; identify surveillance gaps for selected priority diseases; document the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of existing systems; and make appropriate recommendations.
Otherwise, a state must normally invite CDC to participate in research or to carry out surveillance within state boundaries, based on notifiable disease reporting systems.
