Overview: Vaccine Preventable Diseases Surveillance Standards

Overview

This document provides World Health Organization (WHO)-recommended standards for conducting surveillance for vaccine-preventable diseases (VPDs). VPD surveillance provides vital information to help countries understand disease burden and epidemiology to inform vaccine policy and strategy. There are several reasons WHO is updating the VPD surveillance standards at this time. WHO published the last set of surveillance standards in 2003 and included 13 VPDs, with the standards for Japanese encephalitis updated in 2008.

Since that time, VPD control programmes have progressed, new vaccines have been introduced globally, laboratory diagnostic practices have changed, and some VPD case definitions have been modified, making the 2003 VPD surveillance standards out of date. While surveillance standards for some individual VPDs have been updated more recently, no single document compiles existing surveillance standards for most VPDs, to be used on a global scale.