Social determinants and surveillance in the new Millennium

Excerpt

Surveillance has been a common practice in Public Health (Teutsch and Churchill 2000; Lee et al. 2010; Croft et al. 2009), although, until recent decades, it has been applied mainly to the infectious diseases. Now, that Non communicable diseases (NCD’s) are the major cause of morbidity and mortality globally, much attention has been paid to NCD surveillance and, more specifically, to the surveillance of NCD related risk factors. This is often called Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance (BRFS, McQueen and Puska 2003; Campostrini and McQueen, 2005) to emphasize the importance of risk factors, although, in the practice, BRFS practice covers a wide range of public health related matters (e.g., from vaccination to service access to demographic data). …