Challenges in designing a disease surveillance plan: What we have and what we need?

The early detection of disease for public health inventions presents many research challenges involving data integration and simulation, multivariate spatio-temporal clustering, non-stationary incidences and related disease groups. These present researchers with many opportunities for new methodology to meet the challenges of integrating severity of outcomes, using several sources of data relating to disease counts (e.g., presentations at emergency departments and related medication sales) and a number of dimensions of geography (e.g., home residence and workplace/school of people with the disease) into a single plan. This paper reviews some of the current challenges.