Question

When thinking about chronic diseases, how do you perceive the purpose and utility of passive surveillance as an epidemiological tool? Explain with an example of a chronic disease surveillance system. Would you advocate the reporting of select chronic conditions? Why? Give reasons for your answer.

Answer 1

Ans) It is difficult for any infectious and chronic disease control body will achieve its objective without involving passive surveillance.

- Passive surveillance greatly facilitates data acquiring on how the growing disease are faced and the population faced by the challenges.

- Through the surveillance, it is possible for the organisation responsible for controlling the challenge of diseases to have appropriate mitigation measures to reduce the infection.

Example with explaination:

- Currently seven tick-borne diseases are nationally notifiable in the U.S.

- In 2016, Lyme disease was the most common vector-borne disease reported and the sixth most common of all nationally notifiable diseases.

- While approximately 35,000 cases of Lyme disease are reported each year to the CDC, recent studies indicate that the actual number of annual cases exceeds 300,000.

- Under-reporting is a common phenomenon for most high-incident diseases, and Lyme disease under-reporting is further complicated by a case definition that requires both laboratory and supportive clinical data for confirmation of all but the earliest manifestations of the illness.

- National disease reporting, while coordinated by CDC, is formally a responsibility of state governments through the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE). CSTE determines, through votes of its membership, which diseases are nationally-notifiable and the specifics of case definitions.

- The resulting data are submitted to CDC where the information from each state is collated and made available nationally. Accurate and up-to-date incidence data for all tick-borne diseases, including Lyme disease, are critical in order to demonstrate the burden of illness in terms of both economic cost and human suffering, to establish baselines against which to measure prevention efforts and to monitor disease emergence in new geographic areas.

- Under-reporting and inconsistencies in surveillance data from state to state and from year to year significantly hamper efforts to raise public awareness of the magnitude of the problem and provide data needed to evaluate prevention effectiveness.