[Surveillance of invasive diseases]

Severe clinical conditions are due to invasive diseases that are not routinely reported in a routine surveillance system, in Italy. Nevertheless we can estimate the incidence of invasive diseases considering the surveillance system of bacterial meningitis, the Hospital Discharge Registry and the laboratory-based surveillance, this is useful to outline the trend of S. pneumoniae infections. We report the results of some Italian studies on the pneumococcal infections together with some international studies.