Epidemiology Discussion: Influence of Active vs. Passive Surveillance

This discussion board post delves into the contrasting influences of active and passive surveillance on the known epidemiology of diseases. It highlights that while passive surveillance, characterized by ongoing reporting from healthcare facilities, is less time-consuming and expensive, it is prone to biases and may miss critical details, particularly concerning rare diseases. Conversely, active surveillance, involving direct investigation by healthcare professionals, offers a more accurate assessment of disease prevalence and incidence, reducing the risk of bias, though it is more resource-intensive. The discussion emphasizes that active surveillance is more effective in eliminating diseases due to its comprehensive data collection and professional expertise. The post concludes by recommending active surveillance for gaining unbiased and accurate epidemiological insights. Desklib offers a platform for students to access this and similar solved assignments.

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How does active v passive surveillance influence the known epidemiology of a disease?
In the last few decades, disease surveillance has gained attention around the globe due to
a high rate of chronic disease which further contributed to a high morbidity rate. Hence, to
reduce the high rate of morbidity and global burden, disease surveillance grown into a complete
discipline.
Epidemiological surveillance is considered as systematic collection, analysis of data as well as
the distribution of health data for appropriate planning of an intervention, implementation, and
evaluation of health promotion (Collins et al., 2015). According to world health organizations,
these surveillance serves as an early cautionary system for approaching public health
emergencies, document the effect of the interventions and track the progress of actions towards
the desired goal and monitor epidemiology such as prevalence and incidents of the diseases
which is affecting public health (Birkhead, Klompas & Shah, 2015). Hence, to monitor these
factors the surveillance can be active and passive. While a passive surveillance system consists
of regular, ongoing reporting as well as diseases and conditions by all health facilities in a given
territory, active surveillance is considered as the monitoring system where in order to identify a
specific disease or condition, health care facilities visit places, review the medical records and
make conclusion regarding the disease. Both of the surveillance process influence epidemiology
in two different ways (Klingler et al., 2017). Ethical issues in passive surveillance also affect the
epidemiology as it sometimes breach confidentiality by exposing public health data.
As discussed by Groseclose and Buckeridge (2017), passive surveillance is a less time-
consuming process as well as less expensive to run. The possible reason behind this advantage is
there is no active search was conduct for the patient rather the passive report was generated and

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updated by local staff. It influences the epidemiology of the disease as the information reported
by local staffs have a lot of bias and local staff may miss small details of the
disease or conditions. On the other hand, active surveillance is time-consuming as health
professionals visit the place where disease outbreak was observed (Klingler et al., 2017).
Hence, the chance of potential bias in determining prevalence and incidence of the disease is less
compared to passive surveillance. While it is a time-consuming process and difficult to conduct,
it provides accurate prevalence and incidence rate of any rare disease which cannot be observed
in passive surveillance.
Many researchers highlighted the personal bias that influence of epidemiology of the
disease. While passive surveillance have personal bias and failed to determine rare disease due to
lack expertise of the local staffs, active surveillance provides opportunity to the professionals to
gather information such as prevalence and incidence of the disease which further provides idea
of the distribution of the disease, hence, unlike passive surveillance, active surveillance was done
for eliminating the disease (Collins et al., 2015). In order to gain unbiased and accurate incidents
and prevalence of diseases, it is recommended to use active surveillance.

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References:
Birkhead, G. S., Klompas, M., & Shah, N. R. (2015). Uses of electronic health records for public
health surveillance to advance public health. Annual review of public health, 36, 345-359.
Collins, A. J., Foley, R. N., Gilbertson, D. T., & Chen, S. C. (2015). United States Renal Data
System public health surveillance of chronic kidney disease and end-stage renal
disease. Kidney international supplements, 5(1), 2-7.
Groseclose, S. L., & Buckeridge, D. L. (2017). Public health surveillance systems: recent
advances in their use and evaluation. Annual review of public health, 38, 57-79.
Klingler, C., Silva, D. S., Schuermann, C., Reis, A. A., Saxena, A., & Strech, D. (2017). Ethical
issues in public health surveillance: a systematic qualitative review. BMC public
health, 17(1), 295.