1 How do we define surveillance?

Surveillance is defined as (CDC, 2018):

the ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of health-related data essential to planning, implementation, and evaluation of public health practice, closely integrated with the timely dissemination of these data to relevant public health stakeholders to inform action at a local, national or global level.

In clearer language, surveillance is the routine collection of health-related data, analysis of these data and feedback of the results, and interpretation to the relevant stakeholders. Surveillance is a widely used public health activity for many forms of infectious and non-infectious diseases. Surveillance is not in itself a scientific research activity, though some research projects make use of data that are collected in surveillance systems. Sometimes, surveillance systems in low and middle-income countries (LMIC) are funded or operated by research organisations, which adds to the confusion. The main differences between research and surveillance is that research is trying to ‘generate new knowledge’ whereas surveillance aims to monitor the size of a known health issue and/or monitor for emerging health issues.

Introduction

2 What is AMR?