What Is Syndromic Surveillance?
The term syndromic surveillance describes the growing array of surveillance methods aimed at early detection of epidemics related to biologic terrorism. Although syndromic surveillance originated before 2001, the field grew substantially after the terrorist attacks of 2001 generated fears of future attacks. The word syndromic has been applied because the majority of such systems monitor different syndromes that might herald the early stages of epidemics (2). Other syndromic surveillance systems monitor health indicators of different actions persons might take or consequences they might suffer (e.g., miss work, use outpatient services, purchase medications, or require ambulance transport for emergency care) from the early stages of illness until death. Although certain syndromic surveillance systems depend on manual data collection, the 2003 conference emphasized systems that use automated methods to harvest data stored electronically and then transmit and analyze these data. The majori
