In the last decade, syndromic surveillance has increasingly
been used worldwide for detecting increases or
outbreaks of infectious diseases that might be missed
by surveillance based on laboratory diagnoses and
notifications by clinicians alone. There is, however,
an ongoing debate about the feasibility of syndromic
surveillance and its potential added value. Here we
present our perspective on syndromic surveillance,
based on the results of a retrospective analysis of
syndromic data from six Dutch healthcare registries,
covering 1999–2009 or part of this period. These
registries had been designed for other purposes,
but were evaluated for their potential use in signalling
infectious disease dynamics and outbreaks. Our
results show that syndromic surveillance clearly has
added value in revealing the blind spots of traditional
surveillance, in particular by detecting unusual, local
outbreaks independently of diagnoses of specific
pathogens, and by monitoring disease burden and virulence
shifts of common pathogens. Therefore we recommend
the use of syndromic surveillance for these
applications