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Title: Bio-surveillance
Author: Future Agenda | https://www.futureagenda.org
Permalink:
https://www.futureagenda.org/foresights/bio-surveillance/
Active gathering and interpretation of data related to threats to human and animal health delivers faster early warning and situational awareness.
In an era of increased globalization, public health and surveillance are playing an increased role in bio-security. Protecting us from the outbreak of disease has become an increasingly hot topic in healthcare circles and is a focus for major investment. As part of global and national health security systems, public health surveillance is widely used for such activities as detecting new cases; estimating impact; modelling the spread of diseases; evaluating prevention and control measures; and strategic prevention planning. To achieve these ambitious objectives involves ongoing and systematic collection, analysis, interpretation and dissemination of a mass of health-related data on the population. An emerging field, known as bio-surveillance, has involved the expansion of the traditional public health surveillance into detecting and predicting bio-terrorist threats and disease outbreaks in animals and plants. This is far from easy and, as the world becomes more susceptible to the rapid spread of epidemics and pandemics, we face a challenge highlighted by Jack Lord in his view on the future of health – namely, that ‘our ability to achieve global bio-surveillance for disease is limited because of unequal infrastructure, inadequate local investments and only limited global cooperation’. Successfully delivering and operating a reliable bio-surveillance system demands not just an alignment of multiple sources of data but the analytical capability to make sense of the data and highlight the critical patterns for disease detection and prevention. With global health security increasingly high on national agendas, many across the healthcare system see bio-surveillance as a priority and one that could be fundamental in changing how we deal with public health in the future.
Bio-surveillance is presently defined as ‘a systematic process that monitors the environment for bacteria, viruses, and other biological agents that cause disease; detects disease in people, plants, or animals caused by those agents; and detects and characterises outbreaks of such disease’. It is a continuous process that encompasses not just data collection from myriad sources but also rapid, intelligent analysis and interpretation. It is by its very nature multidisciplinary, multi-organisational, data intensive, time critical, knowledge intensive and highly complex. As such, being able to bring together all the necessary ingredients in an effective manner is seen by many as one of the biggest challenges that we currently face. Improving the effectiveness of bio-surveillance programmes and the use of new technologies to enhance data collection and analysis are therefore high on the list of imperatives for many public health systems. Therefore, in recent years, organisations such the US based Center for Disease Control (CDC) have been investing in projects like BioSense, which is ‘designed to increase the nation’s emergency preparedness through the development of a national network for real-time disease detection, monitoring, and health situational awareness’. Linking together data feeds from over 2,000 hospitals, it is a major step by the US in detecting diseases and is already seen ‘as part of the nation’s overall bio-terrorism and emergency preparedness strategy’.
Read moreFrom
The World In 2020