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NOTE: A surveillance case definition is a set of uniform criteria used to define a disease for public health surveillance. Surveillance case definitions enable public health officials to classify and count cases consistently across reporting jurisdictions. Surveillance case definitions are not intended to be used by healthcare providers for making a clinical diagnosis or determining how to meet an individual patient’s health needs.

Clinical Description

An illness of variable severity commonly manifested by diarrhea, abdominal pain, nausea, and sometimes vomiting. Asymptomatic infections may occur, and the organism may cause extraintestinal infections.

Laboratory Criteria For Diagnosis

Isolation of Salmonella from a clinical specimen.

Case Classification

Probable

A clinically compatible case that is epidemiologically linked to a confirmed case.

Confirmed

A case that is laboratory confirmed

Comments

Laboratory-confirmed isolates are reported to CDC via the Public Health Laboratory Information System (PHLIS), which is managed by the Foodborne and Diarrheal Diseases Branch, Division of Bacterial and Mycotic Diseases, National Center for Infectious Diseases, CDC. Both probable and confirmed cases are reported to the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System, but only confirmed cases are reported to PHLIS. Both asymptomatic infections and infections at sites other than the gastrointestinal tract, if laboratory confirmed, are considered confirmed cases that should be reported to PHLIS.

The 1997 case definition appearing on this page was previously published in the 1990 MMWR Recommendations and Reports titled Case Definitions for Public Health Surveillance.1 Thus, the 1990 and 1997 versions of the case definition are identical.

References

  1. CDC. (1990). Case Definitions for Public Health Surveillance. MMWR, 39(RR-13), 1-43. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00025629.htm

Related Case Definition(s)