Biosurveillance

Biosurveillance refers to the integration of a wide variety of data to predict and quickly detect health events and forecast their impacts in a way that improves response decisions. As a practice, biosurveillance emerged out of public health surveillance with the goal of integrating significantly more data (and more types of data) for earlier and more accurate detection of health events. Practitioners believe that biosurveillance could lead to a more nuanced understanding of the early signs of the emergence and spread of diseases. Analysts look for a clearer disease signal in all the noisy data that can be gathered from human and animal activity. The conduct of biosurveillance, whether for public health or national security purposes, raises questions of individual privacy when so much of ...