Background: Concern over bio-terrorism has led to recognition that traditional public health surveillance for specific conditions is unlikely to provide timely indication of some disease outbreaks, either naturally occurring or induced by a bioweapon. In non-traditional surveillance, the use of health care resources are monitored in "near real" time for the first signs of an outbreak, such as increases in emergency department (ED) visits for respiratory, gastrointestinal or neurological chief complaints (CC).
For patients with positive MRI at the time of their initial neurologic event, both gadolinium-enhancing lesions and the Barkhof criteria are predictors for development of CDMS over a short interval. However, these results, based on a combined CDMS/MRI outcome, suggest that the majority of these patients are already in the earliest stages of MS, regardless of whether any further MRI criteria are met.
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