Chapter Overview
The practice of biosurveillance primarily involves measuring disease cases accurately and precisely in a given population. However, measuring the size and composition of the actual population at risk for the diseases under surveillance is just as important, particularly when the objective of surveillance is to measure rates of disease. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the issues pertaining to selection of the population denominator in population surveillance, with a particular focus on age and age-adjustment. This chapter presents an overview of several data sources commonly available to surveillance and epidemiological professionals, along with a synopsis of graphical and statistical tools to help assess and adjust for age effects in disease patterns.
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Suggested Reading
Rowland DT. Demographic Methods and Concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This is an essential overview of a variety of basic demographic concepts and procedures and serves as an excellent resource for public health researchers and practitioners into this relevant field.
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Online Resources
The US Census Bureau maintains an excellent and user-friendly database of data from the most recent decennial censuses. Most decennial Census data are available for many levels of geography, including states, countries, cities and towns, ZIP codes, census tracts and blocks, and much more. These data can be found on the Census Bureau’s website, or on a data clearinghouse webpage known as Data Ferret.
The websites for this database can be found at:•http://www.factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DatasetMainPageServlet?_program=DEC&_submenuId=&_lang=en&_ts=•http://www.dataferrett.census.gov/
The US Census Bureau’s website also maintains a database containing intercensal population estimates from the Population Estimates Program. This one page contains links to all the publicly available datasets and is organized by geographic level and contains data dating back to 1990.• http://www.census.gov/popest/datasets.html
The archived population estimates, dating back in some cases to 1900, can be found at:• http://www.census.gov/popest/archives/
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Cohen, S.A., Naumova, E.N. (2011). Age-Adjustment in National Biosurveillance Systems. In: Castillo-Chavez, C., Chen, H., Lober, W., Thurmond, M., Zeng, D. (eds) Infectious Disease Informatics and Biosurveillance. Integrated Series in Information Systems, vol 27. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6892-0_11
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