BMJ 2002;324:1210-1213 ( 18 May )

Education and debate

Education and debate
    Consent, confidentiality, and the threat to public health surveillance
    Commentary: Don't waive consent lightlyinvolve the public

Consent, confidentiality, and the threat to public health surveillance

Chris Verity, past chairman, British Paediatric Surveillance Unit Executive Committee ^a, Angus Nicoll, director ^b. 

^a Child Development Centre, Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge CB2 2QQ, ^b PHLS Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre, 61 Colindale Avenue, London NW9 5EQ

Correspondence to: C Verity christopher.verity@addenbrookes.nhs.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Effective protection of public health requires direction from the information provided by disease surveillance¹for example, in the cases of AIDS and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease surveillance data led to action that protected health. ^{2 3} Health surveillance relies entirely on prompt and accurate reporting of the occurrence of disease by doctors and other health professionals.¹ Recently there has been increased concern in the United Kingdom about the need to maintain the confidentiality of information arising from consultations between doctor and patient. Documents have been issued regulating or advising on transfer of patient data. Some have argued that, unless needed for direct patient care, data should not be transferred to third parties without patients' explicit consent, or, alternatively, that all identifying information must first be removed.⁴ The difficulty in countering these arguments arises partly from the fact that health surveillance, including that for communicable diseases, has been neglected in official guidance on confidentiality.⁵ . . . [Full text of this article]

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This article has been cited by other articles:

• Gershon, A. S. MD MSc, Tu, J. V. MD PhD (2008). The effect of privacy legislation on observational research. CMAJ 178: 871-873 [Full text]  
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• Ford, H. L (2006). The effect of consent guidelines on a multiple sclerosis register. Mult Scler 12: 104-107 [Abstract]  
• Tu, J. V., Willison, D. J., Silver, F. L., Fang, J., Richards, J. A., Laupacis, A., Kapral, M. K., the Investigators in the Registry of the Canadian, (2004). Impracticability of Informed Consent in the Registry of the Canadian Stroke Network. NEJM 350: 1414-1421 [Abstract] [Full text]  
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