Australia's national serosurveillance program

Abstract

Serosurveillance is an important component of any comprehensive surveillance system for vaccine preventable diseases. Disease notification data are necessary to detect outbreaks and can provide timely epidemiological profiles of a disease. However, the incidence of a disease is often under-estimated by notifications, especially when a proportion of cases are asymptomatic. If this proportion changes with age, or if cases are clinically misdiagnosed, then notification data may present biased information.