Public Health Agency of Canada
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Notifiable Diseases On-Line
Table 1 presents the current list of notifiable diseases and the years in which the disease required notification and provides links to descriptions of the diseases.
Table 1: Current List of Nationally Notifiable Diseases and Years of Notifiability
Disease-specific descriptions
Each notifiable disease link provides a brief description of the disease including the disease agent, worldwide distribution, symptoms, period of communicability, how it is transmitted, and prevention and control.
Data Collection Process
The Canadian Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (CNDSS) is a national surveillance system designed to capture information regarding Canada's nationally notifiable diseases. Notifiable disease surveillance is carried out under provincial/territorial authority. Each province and territory independently captures data regarding notifiable diseases in their respective jurisdictions and voluntarily submits data regarding nationally notifiable diseases to the CNDSS. As of October 2009, there are 60 infectious diseases under national surveillance.
Data captured in the CNDSS is dependent on the actions of a string of public health professionals. Physicians and/or laboratories report notifiable diseases to the local health authorities who determine whether the surveillance case definition is met prior to officially reporting the case to the provincial/territorial level and collecting all necessary epidemiologic data. Possible cases can be reported, but must be deleted if the case definition is not subsequently satisfied. The provinces/territories then voluntarily submit their data to the CNDSS. Thus, the quality of the data maintained in the CNDSS is a reflection of Canada's public health reporting system.
There are a small number of diseases for which data is provided by PHAC programs rather than collecting directly from the provinces or territories. Data is collected from programs rather than provinces and territories for programs that involve the collection of individual detailed case information, or in the case of laboratory confirmed influenza, when reporting techniques across the country are so varied that the program collection method is the only common form between jurisdictions. These diseases can be found in Table 3.
Table 3: Diseases for which case numbers are received from PHAC programs
| Acute Flaccid Paralysis |
| Laboratory Confirmed Influenza |
| HIV and AIDS |
| Tuberculosis |
| Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease |
| West Nile Virus Infection |
