March 2022: Public Health Surveillance

Posted on February 1, 2022 by Lloyd F. Novick

This March issue of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice focuses on public health surveillance. The lead editorial by Jeffrey Bethel describes wastewater surveillance as a powerful tool in monitoring communicable disease. This innovative technique is now being used for COVID-19 surveillance to determine the spread of this pathogen in communities. Researchers have found a correlation between occurrence of the virus in wastewater and diagnosed COVID-19 cases. Bethel points out that detecting pathogens in wastewater dates to the 1930s and 1940s when detection of the virus causing poliomyelitis showed that the virus was spread through the fecal-oral route.

Sebastian Romano and co-authors describe syndromic surveillance practices at 31 state and local public health agencies participating in the National Syndromic Surveillance Program funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). While a wide variety of conditions were reported, the most common syndromes were influenza-like illness and drug related syndromes. Emergency departments were shown to be the most prevalent data source.

In 2014, two nurses in Texas were infected with Ebola virus while involved with the treatment of a patient from Liberia. Steven Franklin and colleagues report that in 2015 CDC awarded $85 million to 55 health care-associated infection and antibiotic resistance programs to address infection control gaps in US health care facilities and to strengthen state and local health departments’ capabilities to respond to emerging diseases including Ebola.

Six articles in the issue describe public health interventions to address HIV infection. These include HIV elimination strategies, providing for better health outcomes in vulnerable populations and self-testing. In this issue, 43 online articles are published and available at www.JPHMP.com. This bolus of articles has been published to eliminate our backlog of articles queued for publication, enabling us to transfer articles to print issues as quickly as possible.

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Lloyd F. Novick: Lloyd F. Novick, MD, MPH, is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Public Health at the Brody School of Medicine, East Carolina University. Previously, he was chair of this Department. He has served as the Commissioner of Health and Secretary for Human Services of Vermont, Director of Health Services for Arizona, and Director of the Office of Public Health for New York State. Previous academic positions include Professor and Director of the Preventive Medicine Program for SUNY Upstate Medical University, Professor and Chair of Epidemiology at the University of Albany School of Public Health, and Clinical Professor and Director of the Teaching Program in Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Vermont, College of Medicine. He is the Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice. He is also editor of five books, including Public Health Administration: Principles for Population-Based Management; Public Health Issues in Disaster Preparedness; Community-Based Prevention Programs that Work; Public Health Leaders Tell Their Stories; and Health Problems in the Prison Setting. He is past president of the Association of Teachers of Prevention and Research (APTR) and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO). He has received a number of national awards, including Special Recognition Award, American College of Preventive Medicine (2005); Duncan Clark Award, Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine (2003); Yale University Distinguished Service Award (2003); Excellence in Health Administration, American Public Health Association (2001); and the Arthur T. McCormack Award, Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (1992). He is a graduate of Colgate University (BA), New York University (MD), and Yale University (MPH).