Computer-based infectious disease surveillance systems are capable of real-time or near real-time detection of serious illnesses and potential bioterrorism agent exposures and represent a major step forward in disease surveillance.  Infectious Disease Informatics: Syndromic Surveillance for Public Health and Bio-Defense is an in-depth monograph that analyzes and evaluates the outbreak modeling and detection capabilities of existing surveillance systems under a unified framework, and presents the first book-length coverage of the subject from an informatics-driven perspective.

Individual chapters consider the state of the art, including the facilitation of data collection, sharing and transmission, a focus on various outbreak detection methods, data visualization and information dissemination issues, and system assessment and other policy issues.  Eight chapters then report on several real-world case studies, summarizing and comparing eight syndromic surveillance systems, including those that have been adopted by many public health agencies (e.g., RODS and BioSense).  The book concludes with a discussion of critical issues and challenges, with a look to future directions.

This book is an excellent source of current information for researchers in public health and IT.  Government public health officials and private-sector practitioners in both public health and IT will find the most up-to-date information available, and students from a variety of disciplines, including public health, biostatistics, information systems, computer science, and public administration and policy will get a comprehensive look at the concepts, techniques, and practices of syndromic surveillance.