Updates to the Canadian Notifiable Disease Surveillance System and its interactive website

The Canadian Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (CNDSS) provides data on diseases that have been identified as priorities for public health monitoring and control. Several advances that have been made on Notifiable Diseases Online, the CNDSS interactive website, are consistent with the Government of Canada's commitment to Open Data. This article provides an update on changes in case definitions that have been made since the case definitions were last published in 2009, and describes updates that have been made to the interactive website since 2013. Changes were made to the case definitions of five diseases. For hepatitis C, the new case definition now distinguishes between acute and chronic infection. For cyclosporiasis, the probable case definition requires an epidemiologic link, with the clarification that this would likely be due to exposure to a common food source. For rabies, the probable case definition now refers to detection of rabies-neutralizing antibody instead of specific antibody titres. For Lyme disease, the revised confirmed and probable case definitions now identify five options for Lyme disease risk areas instead of endemic areas. For tuberculosis the revised case definition now includes nucleic acid amplification testing in addition to culture for diagnosis. The Notifiable Diseases Online website is an interactive tool that enables users to create customized figures and tables. Since a major redesign in 2013, numerous changes have been made to the look and feel of the site. Figures and tables can now be extracted as Excel or PDF files and large datasets are exportable into Excel files for further analysis. Case definitions in the national surveillance system will be updated as needed and its interactive website will continue to be improved and updated in response to user comments.