What is the difference between chronic disease surveillance and infectious disease surveillance?

The difference is that infectious disease surveillance depends on the type of disease being monitored, but the main targets are cases, deaths, vaccine coverage and pathogens (influenza).

Chronic disease surveillance, on the other hand, focuses on risk factors, such as the WHO's STEPS surveillance system.

Taking the monitoring questionnaire of the West Pacific Region as an example, the monitoring contents mainly include dietary patterns, smoking, alcohol consumption, salt intake, physical activity, primary health services, blood biochemical indicators and anthropometry (height, weight, waist circumference, hip circumference, blood pressure, heart rate) items.

The main components of infectious disease surveillance include demographic information, morbidity and mortality from infectious diseases and their distribution, pathogen type, virulence, drug resistance variation, and determination of immunization status of the population.

As well as animal hosts and vector insects population distribution and pathogen carrying situation, transmission dynamics and its influence on the investigation of factors, the evaluation of the effectiveness of control measures, epidemic prevention and control.

The main elements of NCD surveillance include, demographic information; NCD morbidity/illness and mortality and their distribution, population lifestyle and behavioral risk factor surveillance.

As well as the monitoring of geographic, environmental and socio-humanitarian (including economic) factors, the investigation of dietary and nutritional factors, the monitoring of genotypes and genetic background factors, the identification of high-risk groups, and the evaluation of the effectiveness of prevention and intervention measures.