The Challenges of Waterway Surveillance

Timeliness is key. It has to pre-date or align or augment additional data, which may be collected at healthcare facilities. Even a day or two lag in there starts to interfere with the ability to be a leading indicator for actually public health action in our healthcare systems. The second thing you mentioned was selecting new targets. And that's certainly a challenge. First of all, it has to be something of public health significance. There's no sense going in just to measure something for the sake of measuring it. We have to be able to measure it accurately and speak standard out to other targets as well.