Establishing Goals, Techniques and Priorities for National Communicable Disease Surveillance

routinely monitored? How should they be monitored? Why are we monitoring them at all? The national Advisory Committee on Epidemiology set up a subcommittee to ponder these questions in 1987. The con clusions this committee reached led to recom mendations on communicable disease surveillance which were subsequently endorsed by the Advisory Committee on Epidemiology. These recommendations, summarized in this article, will have a significant impact on microbiologists and clinicians in this country both from the standpoint of their workload and data they may have available for the study of communicable diseases.