Communicable Disease Surveillance

Communicable Disease Surveillance
Communicable diseases are those diseases that can be communicated form one person to another or from animals, insects, ticks, fish or birds to humans.

The World Health organization is the authoritative body regulating the health programmes internationally. The World Health Organization has a separate wing meant especially for surveillance on the communicable diseases. The surveillance wing is known as Global Alert and Response Wing.

The global Alert response has a vision of an incorporated approach to issuing alerts regarding communicable diseases and other public health emergencies on a global level. It also strives to base its work of international surveillance, on the strong national public health systems of each country.

Basic Functions:

* To support the member countries in their national endeavor against epidemic or communicable diseases. Based on the International Health Regulations, IHR (2005) the member countries are encouraged to implement the alert system on a national level and they also follow certain guidelines laid down by the World Health Organization with respect to laboratory capacities, early issue of warning alerts and response systems to epidemics.

* The World Health Organization- Global Alert Response also conducts and overlooks a variety of training programmes for preparation to handle communicable diseases, on a national and an international level.

* The Global Alert Response also coordinates and offers support to its member States and guides them on the standardized procedure for dealing with certain communicable diseases that have a high prevalence of turning in to epidemics.

* Global Alert Response also emphasizes on fortifying bio security, bio safety for the newly emerging disease outbreaks like in case of SARS, H1N1 (Swine flu) etc.

* To maintain a common platform for disease control operations and support for the local regional offices in the respective member countries.

Response Actions:

Once a communicable disease is identified and confirmed to be an Epidemic or a Pandemic, the Global Alert Response springs in to action, and takes the following steps as listed:

* Continuous tracking and monitoring of the spread of the disease.

* Verification of the notified cases and relevant data.

* Distribution of relevant information regarding the nature of the disease, how it is caused, the symptoms and signs of the disease, steps to be undertaken by the common public and medical professionals in dealing with the disease, preventive measures and also information regarding the latest available laboratory tests and the treatment available for that specific disease.

* To coordinate outbreak response logistics.