While in-country surveillance usually makes use of "formal" data gathering mechanisms, disease intelligence goes further than this and makes use of additional information sources, many of them informal and often based outside the country's standard surveillance system. Disease intelligence is therefore used to boost awareness of disease threats and developments that may otherwise remain unknown.
As an example, the World Health Organization (WHO) "Global Outbreak Alert and Response" system has developed, in collaboration with Health Canada, a disease intelligence system called the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN). GPHIN is an Internet-based "early warning" application that gathers reports of public health significance from global electronic media (news wires, Web sites) and uses human review and computerized text mining to filter, organize and classify this information. It is then disseminated to WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, and to other public health professionals around the world by means of a secure Web site and e-mail. Through this mechanism, GPHIN serves as a global initiator for risk identification, assessment and management. GPHIN has effectively bypassed the traditional national infectious disease surveillance systems in which data from case reports at a local level are progressively aggregated up to the national level to trigger public health actions. Economic and political concerns have historically inhibited countries from timely reporting of outbreaks of public health importance to the international level (e.g. to WHO). GPHIN provides real-time, informal information that, unlike ProMed,1 is assessed by WHO experts for its potential public health importance and then, through its privileged access to member countries, proactively verifies the information. The system enables timely responses with the goal of minimizing the health and economic impacts of outbreaks. GPHIN's original scope focused on infectious diseases. Additional modules that include food, water, radiation and product safety and therapeutics have since been developed. GPHIN has successfully begun to harness the vast amounts of information available on the Internet and changed the paradigm in which public health professionals function (keynote for the 6th World Congress on the Internet in Medicine [MEDNET 2001], Udine, Italy, 29 November - 2 December 2001).
Source: Communicable Disease Surveillance and Response Web site: www.who.int/emc/index.html
1 The Programme for Monitoring of Emerging Diseases (ProMed) is a policy initiative of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), calling for global monitoring of emerging diseases. Web site: www.fas.org/promed/