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U.S. Health Officials Highlight Surveillance Systems By David McGlinchey GENEVA — Senior U.S. health officials here yesterday touted several developing health surveillance systems and said that the programs will make it easier to detect a biological terrorist attack (see GSN, Oct. 10). Public health advocates and specialists have made recent appeals for improved national health surveillance, both to defend against biological terrorism and to monitor naturally occurring health trends. Saying that currently, “our surveillance is kind of slow,” U.S. Army Lt. Col. Julie Pavlin said the military has successfully established the Electronic Survillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE). The ESSENCE program tracks health trends at more than 300 fixed U.S. military installations worldwide, reporting indicators such as a high rate of respiratory infections, according to Pavlin. The program can detect an outbreak “earlier than most existing systems,” Pavlin said. The White House is now pushing the BioWatch air-monitoring system — according to Lawrence Kerr, the assistant director for homeland security in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. BioWatch, an urban surveillance system designed to detect an aerosolized biological attack, has air monitors in 31 cities, according to Kerr (see related GSN story, today).
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