The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released a summary of notifiable diseases in the US for the year 2011. These statistics are collected and compiled from reports sent by state health departments and territories to the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS).
According to the CDC, a notifiable disease is one for which regular, frequent, and timely information regarding individual cases is considered necessary for the prevention and control of the disease. The list of nationally notifiable infectious diseases is dynamic, as new diseases are added and others deleted as incidence declines.
I used data from this report to compile a list of the top ten notifiable diseases for 2011 (numbers of cases in parentheses):
- Chlamydia trachomatis infection (1,412,791)
- Gonorrhea (321,849)
- Salmonellosis (51,887)
- Syphilis (46,042)
- HIV diagnoses (35,266)
- Lyme disease (33,097)
- Coccidioidomycosis (22,634)
- Pertussis (18,719)
- Streptococcus pneumoniae invasive disease (17,138)
- Giardiasis (16,747)
Here are the top ten notifiable viral diseases:
- HIV diagnoses (35,266)
- Varicella (chickenpox) (14,513)
- Rabies (4,363)*
- Hepatitis B (2,903)
- Hepatitis A (1,398)
- Hepatitis C (1,229)
- West Nile virus infection (712)
- Mumps (404)
- Dengue (254)
- Measles (220)
Notably absent from the list is influenza, which is not a notifiable disease. Some other notifiable diseases which were not reported in the US in 2011 include poliomyelitis, SARS, and St. Louis encephalitis virus disease.
The report is recommended reading because it summarizes the data in many other ways, including (for example) by state, region, month, and age group.
*Six of the rabies cases were in humans, the remainder in other animals.
I would not have expected Rabies in the top 3!?
Only six of those rabies cases are in humans – the rest are ‘animal rabies’.
Here is what CDC writes about the rabies cases: “During 2011, six cases of human rabies were reported in the United States, the most reported in a single year since 2004. Three cases reported from Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York were associated with canine rabies virus variants acquired outside the United States. Two domestically acquired cases from Massachusetts and South Carolina were associated with bat rabies virus variants. The remaining case reported from California occurred in a person who survived; however, no rabies virus was isolated, and a definitive source of infection was not determined.”
I though that was only for the people
I’m amazed at the varicella numbers. This is a vaccine-preventable disease. What are parents thinking when they do not immunize their children against chicken pox?
In much of Europe, the chicken pox vaccine is not offered as a routine childhood vaccine, and to be honest, it’s mostly a mild disease, which induces life-long immunity. I had chicken pox as a child, and I wouldn’t mind if my child gets it too, at some point.
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