What We Are Watching—Top Global Infectious Disease Threats, 2013-2016: An Update from CDC's Global Disease Detection Operations Center

Abstract

To better track public health events in areas where the public health system is unable or unwilling to report the event to appropriate public health authorities, agencies can conduct event-based surveillance, which is defined as the organized collection, monitoring, assessment, and interpretation of unstructured information regarding public health events that may represent an acute risk to public health. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) Global Disease Detection Operations Center (GDDOC) was created in 2007 to serve as CDC's platform dedicated to conducting worldwide event-based surveillance, which is now highlighted as part of the "detect" element of the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA). The GHSA works toward making the world more safe and secure from disease threats through building capacity to better "Prevent, Detect, and Respond" to those threats. The GDDOC monitors approximately 30 to 40 public health events each day. In this article, we describe the top threats to public health monitored during 2012 to 2016: avian influenza, cholera, Ebola virus disease, and the vector-borne diseases yellow fever, chikungunya virus, and Zika virus, with updates to the previously described threats from Middle East respiratory syndrome-coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and poliomyelitis.