public health, surveillance data can be useful for multiple purposes: (1) identifying and investigating outbreaks or clusters of diseases; (2) implementing and evaluating prevention and control measures; (3) planning and managing resources and establishing priorities; (4) identifying trends in occurrences of interest; and (5) identifying emerging problems or new populations at risk of disease (adapted from Calvert et al., 2001). Each of these types of needs is briefly described in Table 7-1 with examples relevant to poisoning prevention.

The following section describes the characteristics and the strengths and weaknesses of current data systems, beginning with the Toxic Exposure Surveillance System (TESS) and other poison-specific data sources, and followed by data sources derived from health records and health care datasets, other exposure-related data sources, and survey data sources. Table 7-2 provides a tabular description of these datasets. This review focuses on existing data resources, including national surveys, that have been designed at least in part for epidemiological tracking purposes or