Communicable Disease Surveillance Ethics in the Age of Big Data and New Technology

摘要

In late February 2003, a man, who had recently travelled to China, presented to a hospital in Hanoi with what an astute clinician recognised as an unusual, severe acute respiratory syndrome (which would come to be known as SARS). At about the same time, the Chinese Ministry of Health announced, belatedly, that an outbreak of severe atypical pneumonia in Guangdong province had already claimed at least 300 lives, since November 2002. Scientists and epidemiologists, from WHO’s Global Influenza Surveillance (GISN) and Global Outbreak and Response (GOARN) networks, immediately began collecting and analysing microbiological, clinical and epidemiological data. By mid-March, another 150 suspected cases of SARS had been identified in Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam and Canada (Heymann and Rodier ).