History of occupational disease surveillances in South Korea

Introduction
In South Korea's occupational health systems , inspite of workers' compensation insurance statistics and workers' health screening, we could not identify total numbers of occupational diseases.

Methods
Thus we had stared monitoring of occupational disease by surveillance system.

Results
As launching period from 1997 to 2000, we built up occupatioal disease surveillance system with occupational asthma, skin diseases, musculoskeletal disorders. And those were conducted in various types of surveillance research. After this period, surveillance systems were evaluated for quality improvement in the first time in 2004. As growing interest for occupational cancer, occupational lung cancer and occupational hematopoietic cancer were established for the surveillance. Since 2001, there's a discussion of the central monitoring system but, for in 2010 began to build a central monitoring DB. In 2011, there are one occupational cancer surveillance for estimating the incidence rate covering all regions and four disease specific surveillances including malignant mesothelioma, occupational asthma, needle stick injury, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease.

Discussion
Recently, a central monitoring system is expected to support surveillance systems by integrating, analyzing the data collected by each surveillance.