Each state and territory health department in Australia is responsible, under their public health legislation, for conducting disease surveillance in their jurisdiction. In 2002, gastrointestinal and foodborne diseases comprised 27% (26,708/100,278) of all notifications to the National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (Yohannes et al. 2004). This is despite the most common enteric infection - Campylobacter - not being notifiable in New South Wales (Dalton 2004a).

To conduct surveillance of these diseases, these health agencies employ staff to record details of cases on databases, summarise epidemiological information, follow up individual patients and conduct investigations. The exact staffing levels and resources required for these activities are difficult to estimate. This is particularly true for systems that organise surveillance in regional units, where the resources are spread across many public health units. Examples of these regional systems include Queensland and New South Wales (Dalton 2004b).

To estimate the costs associated with maintaining surveillance for foodborne disease, Victoria was taken as a representative example of the state and territory health agencies that conduct surveillance, and then costs were extrapolated to national levels. In 2003, the Victorian Department of Human Services recorded approximately 7,000 gastrointestinal and foodborne infections, and investigated 150 outbreaks of gastroenteritis (Gregory & Lalor 2004). In 2002, resources for maintaining the enteric disease surveillance system were estimated to be $570,000 per annum (J Gregory, OzFoodNet, DHS, April 2002, pers. comm.). This includes costs for investigative staff, database maintenance, data entry and checking, and reporting. Extrapolating this nationally gives a total of $2.3 million spent by state and territory health departments on enteric disease surveillance each year. This is consistent with estimates for states with centralised surveillance, such as South Australia where the estimated yearly cost is $170,000.

In addition, two surveillance systems focus solely on foodborne illness and its prevention. These are OzFoodNet and the National Enteric Pathogens Surveillance Scheme (NEPSS). Both have different, but complementary, aims to determine the burden and causes of foodborne illness in Australia. OzFoodNet provides the capacity to investigate foodborne illness by employing epidemiologists in state and territory health departments, whose activities are coordinated nationally. NEPSS collects laboratory data on specific foodborne infections for analysis of trends and detection of clustering. The costs to maintain OzFoodNet and NEPSS annually are $2.1 million and $200,000 respectively (DoHA unpublished data).

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