Surveillance for viral hepatitis – United States, 2014

As part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS) (1), viral hepatitis case-reports are received electronically from U.S. state and territorial health departments via CDC’s National Electronic Telecommunications System for Surveillance (NETSS), a computerized public health surveillance system that provides CDC with data on a weekly basis. Although the surveillance infrastructure was in place for states to report both acute and chronic infections, case-reports of chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) and past or present hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections, which account for the greatest burden of disease, were not submitted by all states; in 2014, 40 states submitted reports of chronic HBV infection and 37 states submitted reports of chronic HCV infection.