Have you ever questioned filling out documents including you and your family’s
healthcare history? Like, who is using this information and what for, for that matter? Well, the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention has informed us they are using surveillance systems with the intentions of preventing further issues with various diseases and they are using your private healthcare history to do so. How they go about retrieving this information, is the interesting part.
CDC has provided a graphic and summary for us to view from their website explaining their purpose of surveillance and how the data collected, is going to help the United States. See below:
"CDC surveillance systems collect data on chronic diseases and their risk factors. These systems—often the only source of such data—are vital for understanding how chronic diseases affect people in the United States. Without them, our prevention and control efforts would be guesswork. Surveillance data guide us in putting our resources to the best use."
But here’s the thing…
If the data is collected to prevent such chronic diseases, why is it we are still being force-fed garbage regularly? The garbage down the block most of us only have access to or choose to eat for that matter, or how about the personalized nutritional facts we can all find at the click of a button?!?! I mean, they should already know what the problems are by now. They have resources to other healthcare platforms, and it’s evident they have government officials who have the plug on all the tea; the real hot steamy kind of tea people have died for too.
Such resources like the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association, and the American Lung Association just to name a few, even lists preventable precautionary suggest-full tips and stuff. Of course, you must cipher through their recommendations as well though. But with all this being said, data has been shared for decades and to a lot of us, the question we want answers to for the most part is, “when will this data begin to start preventing and helping?”
Now let’s talk about two primary types of surveillance public health departments at local, state, and federal levels can use. There’s passive and active surveillance; most used to monitor disease developments and organize public health care agendas or what they call it…public health care programs?
Passive Surveillance has been understood as the healthcare providers and laboratories introducing the reporting to local and state administrators. These reports sent out are supposed to be on a case-by-case basis.
Active Surveillance can be defined as local or state administrators actively searching for data by contacting healthcare providers, laboratories, places of employment, nursing and rehabilitation homes, schools, etc.
There’s a disease reporting pathway that is followed and CDC is the last to receive the final documented results [see link below for further example]. Think about the chain your information follows and how many individuals can tamper with the details. The government and healthcare officials have not had the best history when it comes to trusting them with our personal and private information therefore, is there a possibility the surveillance systems are actually being used for other than what is expressed to us?
Example of Disease Reporting Pathway>
