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We became very interested in issues to the monitoring of chronic diseases
as the result of the establishment of our childhood diabetes registries
in the mid 1980s. Our research developed into a WHO multinational project
for childhood diabetes which will be described in-depth in the diabetes
lecture. It became very surprising to us that our monitoring system for
childhood diabetes became one of the largest for any chronic disease. We
began to investigate the issues related to the monitoring of non-
communicable diseases (NCDs). What surprised us was how few NCDS had
any type of international monitoring of incidence. Where there was monitoring
often the quality control was so bad, it was impossible to know if the
global patterns were the result of true differences, or merely because
in some countries, these diseases were counted better than in others. Throughout
the literature the problems of monitoring both communicable and non-communicable
diseases has been presented, but not much has been done about it in the
past 100 years in any countries. Disease monitoring now fits into 2 categories,
the first being infectious disease surveillance which is broad, inexpensive,
and very inaccurate. The second is NCD registries which are very limited,
expensive, but accurate. We present to you what is the current cutting
edge of disease monitoring, that of capture-recapture which is taken from
wildlife biology. It is our belief that this is the system of the future
for monitoring diseases such that in the next decade it may be possible
with this and Internet technology to know on an hourly basis the disease
patterns in developing and developed countries alike.
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