Communicable Disease Surveillance: Notification of Infectious Diseases in Canada

Canada, like many countries. collects and collates aggregate data on communicable diseases nationally. The main objectives of this system are to provide a mechanism for monitoring the health of the population by identifying and responding to changes in reporti ng trends of specific diseases and to provide information that can contribute to the development of health policy and the planning of care, prevention and control programs. These activities function at local, provincial/territorial , and national government levels , focusing on populations rather than individuals. Specific use of national surveillance data includes the identification and control of disease outbreaks; the development and implementation of population-based prevention and control activities and the monitoring of these activities; the production of statistics to aid priority setting; and contributions to international surveil lance activities (I). This paper briefly describes the system by which information on notifiable diseases is collected and collated by the federal government. Information on selected (notifiable) communicable diseases has been collected by the Canadian government since 1924. The Statistics Canada and the Health Canada Acts contain the federal government's mandate to collect these data (2,3) . However, provincial governments enact legislation designed to capture individual reports of cases. The list of diseases for which aggregated nationa l data is collected is subject to change, through recategorization of diseases or enlargement by the addition of new diseases to the list. At present 4 7 diseases are reported to the Bureau of Infectious Diseases, Laboratory Centre for Disease Control (LCDC) in Ottawa (Table 1). A subcommittee convened in 1987 by the national Advisory Committee on Epidemiology (ACE) defined the current list. The list was amended to include hepatitis C in 1991 and a more extensive breakdown of syphilis in 1992.