[Development, organization and evaluation of a public health surveillance system]

Health professionals who set health policies and manage prevention and disease control programs are committed to the goals of reducing disease and injury related morbidity and mortality and improving the public's health and quality of life. To determine what health policies are needed and what specific actions should be taken and which epidemiological investigations should be carried out in order to identify lack of coverage of public health programs, decision makers need continuous information in order to tackle upcoming technical questions and to identify the most serious existing and emerging health problems of today's society. Both, political decision makers and health professionals have to ask themselves how those health problems can be prevented and which are the most cost-effective prevention and control strategies for this purpose. Other important issues for the implementation of public health surveillance is the feasibility of available control strategies and their possible impact on different health outcomes. Alternative prevention and control activities have to be evaluated as how they meet the proposed objectives. Finally, remains the question, how scarce economic, material and human recourses should be allocated and targeted in order to achieve maximum impact for health goals. Only a sophisticated public health surveillance system can give answers to all those issues. Surveillance is defined as the ongoing systematic collection, analysis and interpretation of date on specific health events for use in planning, implementation and evaluation of public health programs. Timely dissemination of these data to persons who need to know is essential to effective prevention and control.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)