Surveillance of antibiotic susceptibility of Neisseria gonorrhoeae in the western Pacific.

Surveillance is a "good thing," at least if you're an epidemiologist. But what is it for? In particular, what is an international laboratory based surveillance programme in sexually transmitted diseases for? A recent review in these pages suggested that surveillance programmes could be used to determine the need for public health action, to assess the effectiveness of programmes, to set priorities for planning and resource allocation, and to define high risk subgroups for intervention.' These are all laudable objectives. The trouble is, one can't do all of them well at the same time, particularly if one doesn't have much money. So what are the actual purposes of the international laboratory surveillance of sexually transmitted diseases? On page 355, Tapsall and colleagues2 report the 1992-4 results from the WHO Western Pacific Region Gonococcal Antimicrobial Surveillance Programme (GASP) on antibiotic susceptibility in Neisseria gonorrhoeae. The authors and the WHO are to be congratulated