Surveillance of meningococcal disease in europe.

For a technique often now referred to as "the backbone of public health," it is curious how only recently surveillance has come to be recognized as important. As soon as recording of disease events began, so of course did surveillance, but the first application of the term to "the ongoing scrutiny of disease" is thought to have been by Langmuir (1) in the 1950s. The use of the term has helped to focus attention on it as a technique and a discipline in its own right, and there are now books devoted to the subject (2,3). The technique is also being applied increasingly to chronic disease (2).