School-based Surveillance System(2011)

School-based Surveillance System(2011)

The school-based surveillance system monitors principally common communicable diseases among school children. Elementary schools are places of high population density and school children tend to have lower resistance to diseases. The outbreak of a communicable disease in classrooms can easily turn into an epidemic. For the purpose of effectively detecting and controlling the spread of communicable diseases on school grounds, the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control (Taiwan CDC) launched a pilot program for schools to monitor and report communicable diseases in February 2001. The program started out with 20 reporting schools and now includes 658 elementary schools. By establishing the long-term trends of communicable diseases that school children are susceptible to, the program aims to achieve early detection and prevention of epidemics.