International society for disease surveillance conference 2011: building the future of public health surveillance.

The International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) celebrates its 10th annual meeting with the arrival of the 2011 ISDS Annual Conference, ‘Building the Future of Public Health Surveillance’. This milestone in the Society's history is punctuated not only by the achievements of the disease surveillance community but also by the promise of what lies ahead. The Annual Conference brings together a community of researchers and practitioners focused on monitoring, understanding and improving population health. The abstracts appearing in this special supplement, accepted for presentation at the Annual Conference, include innovative analytical techniques, progressive public health practice and cutting edge informatics that support a timely, accurate and informed response to emerging outbreaks of disease and other health threats. The breadth of topics addressed ranges from detection of novel symptom patterns indicative of newly emerging outbreaks to development of a web platform for the text mining of clinical reports and from surveillance of the illegal wildlife trade for detecting emerging zoonoses to assessing the validity of emergency department-based influenza-like illness syndromes against confirmed laboratory results in children. In addition to the 160 contributed oral and poster presentations, the conference also features a keynote talk from Dr. Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, and plenary sessions on international surveillance, novel technologies and postdisaster surveillance, as well as a variety of informal round table discussions, workshops and committee meetings. The diversity of thinking represented here is great and yet the fibers of these works come together in a yarn that, woven throughout the fabric of public health surveillance, informs the best of what is and what in the future can be.