STD Surveillance Network (SSuN)

Key points

The STD Surveillance Network allows CDC and state and local health departments to better understand the epidemiology of sexually transmitted infections nationally and locally. This can inform national and local prevention efforts, including important initiatives designed to reduce HIV co-infection among persons diagnosed with STIs.

Overview

The purpose of the STD Surveillance Network (SSuN) is to:

  • Provide enhanced behavioral, demographic, and clinical information on gonorrhea cases reported to state and local health departments
  • Provide information on patients presenting for care in specialty STI clinical settings
  • Explore innovative strategies to improve surveillance nationwide

This information allows CDC and state and local health departments to better understand the epidemiology of STIs nationally and locally. This can inform national and local prevention efforts, including important initiatives designed to reduce HIV co-infection among people diagnosed with STIs.

SSuN is a collaboration of competitively selected state, county, and city health departments, funded to address surveillance problems of national, state, and local interest. Established in 2005, SSuN is currently in the fourth cycle. The current cooperative agreement for activities ongoing through 2024 is CDC-RFA-PS19-1907.

Strategies

There are three (two core and one optional) SSuN surveillance strategies, each addressing different methods of enhanced STI surveillance.

Strategy A

Strategy A of SSuN Cycle 4 provides support for selected health departments to implement sentinel surveillance in specialty STI clinics. Funded sites gather information on patient visits, including STI/HIV tests performed at the visit, test results, diagnoses received, and demographic and selected behavioral characteristics of the patients. Sentinel surveillance provides evidence of trends in patients seeking care, trends in provider testing and treatment practices, changes in the number and proportion of patients diagnosed with STIs and HIV co-infection, and uptake of prevention measures such as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP).

Strategy B

Strategy B of SSuN Cycle 4 collects enhanced information on all reported cases of gonorrhea and syphilis. This includes information on laboratory results, treatment, and outcomes from routine partner services interviews. Additionally, all funded sites randomly sample reported gonorrhea cases in their jurisdictions for enhanced clinical, treatment, and behavioral investigations. This provides a probability sample of cases that are weighted to represent all reported cases in the participating sites. Enhanced investigations provide valuable information on gender of sex partners and HIV prevention measures, such as PrEP.

HIV Surveillance Registry Matching‎

All patients attending participating specialty STI clinics in Strategy A, as well as all reported gonorrhea and syphilis cases in Strategy B, are matched against the sites' HIV surveillance registry. This allows for analysis of HIV prevalence among persons diagnosed and reported with selected infections and among persons seeking care in specialty STI clinics.

Strategy C

Strategy C of SSuN Cycle 4 provides resources to support small-scale, time-limited, single- or multi-site projects designed to enhance local surveillance capacity or to investigate issues of specific concern to STI epidemiology. Examples of recent Strategy C activities include:

  • modifying local surveillance information systems to report all STI cases in an HL7-compliant format to CDC
  • enhanced analysis of local- or multi-site surveillance data
  • identification of undiagnosed ocular syphilis in an ophthalmic clinic

Through this combination of collaborative surveillance activities, SSuN provides comprehensive information to supplement what CDC receives via routine national case reporting. This information provides CDC and collaborating health departments with STI-related healthcare and incidence trends not currently available from any other source.

This page includes additional information about SSuN data collection protocols, participating jurisdictions, recent publications, and contact information for SSuN project officers.

Currently Funded SSuN Cycle 4 Collaborators (2019 – 2024)

A U.S. map showing the SSuN Cycle 4 Collaborating States, Cities, and Counties
Map of SSuN Cycle 4 Collaborating Sites
  • Baltimore City Health Department
  • California Department of Public Health
  • City of Columbus Public Health
  • Indiana Department of Health
  • Multnomah County Health Department
  • New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
  • Philadelphia Department of Public Health
  • San Francisco Department of Public Health
  • Utah Department of Health
  • Washington State Department of Health
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Content Source:
National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention; About Division of STD Prevention