Detection and Surveillance, Essay Example

There are many pros and cons to a global surveillance through a web-based monitoring system. The major advantage is that a global surveillance system will allow the world to become informed about many issues that could potentially impact their health, while the major disadvantage is that the system would interfere too significantly with patient privacy. According to “Sustaining Global Surveillance and Response to Emerging Zoonotic Diseases”, global surveillance is a positive thing because it will allow us to track pandemics and epidemics that will provide scientists with evidence about how the disease is spread and this information can be used to develop treatments and cures. Another advantage of web-based surveillance is mentioned in “Using Social Media to Predict and Track Disease Outbreaks” in which physicians can essentially use symptoms that people post on Twitter and Facebook to diagnose them which will provide researchers with a greater understanding of public health.

Although the ability to study patterns of disease is a significant advantage associated with global surveillance through web-based monitoring systems, this could lead to a significant loss of patient privacy. In the situation where someone posts their symptoms on Facebook, they are providing data that will be used in a research study without their consent. While some people believe that information posted on social media should be considered public, other do not, and it is important to consider the view of the individual that the information is being derived from. In large scale surveys of disease, this consideration and ability to retrieve informed consent is nearly impossible. Furthermore, the more that different research organizations share documents to study disease patterns, such as in the case of the spread of zoonotic disease, there is a higher likelihood that patient identifiers will become revealed and defy the regulations set forth by HIPAA.

I am not sure your concerns are well-founded because although the tallying of certain keyword searches on Google may necessarily indicate an accurate depiction for the existence of particular illness, it helps provide us with a better prediction of the global health situation compared to other surveying methods, which are also flawed. Furthermore, while some people would want to manipulate the data, this wouldn’t be a very large group.

References

Briand S. (n.d). Challenges of global surveillance during an influenza pandemic. WHO. Retrieved from http://www.who.int/influenza/surveillance_monitoring/Challenges_global_surveillance.pdf