Signals, Signs and Syndromes: Tracing Digital Transformations in European Health Security

This article traces the ascent of new digital surveillance practices for European health security in an era of heightened global pandemic vigilance. In doing so, the article demonstrates how the confluence of evolving processes of digitisation and production of new digital data sources have enabled EU health security agents in recent years to enhance infectious disease surveillance through novel digitised practices of epidemic intelligence. Subsequently, the article thus argues that the centralisation of these new epidemic intelligence technologies to the core of EU health security initiatives has been foundational to the ascent of a new blended health surveillance practice operating across the EU, which amalgamates the digitised surface alerts of these new big data surveillance technologies with the long-established and traditional disease surveillance legacies of EU Member States. By utilising the concept of surface knowledge in relation to the ascent of these European epidemic intelligence practices, this article demonstrates the key epistemic and methodological shifts which occur in the production of knowledge, alerts and signals for accelerated infectious disease surveillance and the governing of public health risks within the EU.