About the Book

Global Health Surveillance Online describes and analyzes the deep transformations in global mechanisms for monitoring infectious disease outbreaks that have occurred since the mid-1990s. The invention of online techniques for global public health surveillance has dramatically changed the time, space, action capacity, and social organization of global infectious disease control. Mykhalovskiy and Weir examine early warning outbreak detection, which operates electronically through the Internet in order to identify infectious disease outbreaks that may lead to international health emergencies, that is, outbreaks that may be transmitted beyond national borders. The intent of early warning outbreak detection is to make possible public health interventions to stop disease transmission, either by sending global response teams to the site of outbreak, or to alert national public health systems. This book is among the first works to examine these important transformations and is a stunning addition to the fields of global health, global news, surveillance, and globalization.