Public Health Surveillance
Skill targeted: Identifying Trends

Data are collected regularly to help CDC understand how diseases are spreading throughout the United States and around the world. Disease detectives review this data and try to identify patterns. These patterns tells CDC when and where an outbreak may be happening so they can send resources to control its spread. This regular collection of data, or surveillance, can also provide insight on when and where to send resources to prevent disease from spreading in the first place.
This section focuses on basic data collection and how to categorize data by person, place, and time using a variety of graphs and figures.
Students will learn how to:
- Describe how to collect reliable data
- Analyze data to determine magnitude, trends, and patterns of a novel disease process or public health concern
- Define cases, severity, and impact of a disease
- Assess the strengths and weaknesses of various types of surveillance systems
For background information, please review CDC’s Principles of Epidemiology, 3rd Edition Lesson 3: Measures of Risk, Lesson 4: Displaying Public Health Data, and Lesson 5: Public Health Surveillance
Activities
- I Have a Gut Feeling…E. coli O157:H7 Case Study pdf icon[PDF – 29 pages] | PowerPoint ppt icon[PPT – 212 KB]
- Spatial Analysis of Obesity: GIS and descriptive epidemiology pdf icon[PDF – 41 pages]
- Drink Up: Lesson in Survey Methodology pdf icon[PDF – 23 pages]
- Lurking Radon and Lung Cancer pdf icon[PDF – 55 pages]