Question: Information drives a public health official's ability to predict disease outbreaks and trends. Increasingly, emerging natural and man-made threats are making the need for timely, accurate, and reliable information more urgent. As discussed previously, valuable information comes from a variety of data sources. A critical task for public health professionals is determining what might be considered "actionable intelligence"-how to gather it, how to validate it, and how to make sense of it.

To complete this portion of your Scholar-Practitioner Project, write a 2-page paper analyzing the practical ramifications of identifying, collecting, validating, and analyzing data for syndromic surveillance. Compare your analysis to traditional disease surveillance.