New website tracks vaccine preventable diseases across the United States

A new website will track the spread of vaccine-preventable diseases across the United States to offer the public, the media, healthcare providers, public health officials, and policymakers reliable and visual information about current disease trends.

The U.S. Disease Tracker, created and run by Johns Hopkins University, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, and the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, in partnership with state and territorial public health agencies, will initially monitor cases of measles, meningitis and pertussis (whooping cough), and later be expanded to include other vaccine-preventable diseases.

The tracker builds on and complements the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's national disease surveillance infrastructure by providing open access data that is timely, detailed and designed for broad audiences.

"The COVID-19 pandemic elucidated both the value of timely and accessible public health data, as well as the importance of data standardization," said project co-lead Lauren Gardner, director of Johns Hopkins' Center for Systems Science and Engineering, an expert in using data and modeling to better understand the spread of disease. "What makes this tracker unique is its foundation in standardized and validated public health data. The partnership enables a more complete and epidemiologically meaningful view of disease activity and transmission patterns, and a more reliable resource for public health professionals, policymakers, researchers, and the public."

The tracker presents and displays data in a standardized format that is comparable across the participating jurisdictions, enabling more accurate and uniform representation of national disease trends.

Cases are tracked at the state and sub-state level, with detailed visualizations designed to capture disease trends across the U.S. and over time.

Cases are additionally reported by age group to illustrate the most affected populations.

To date, over 25 jurisdictions have committed to joining the effort. Currently, data from 10 participating states are directly reflected on the tracker, with more than 15 additional jurisdictions committed to begin participating in 2026.

By providing easy to understand maps, figures, and analyses of vaccine preventable diseases in the United States, we hope to guide public health policy decisions and inform health care providers so they can better advise and care for their patients. The tracker offers a critical resource for enabling informed decision making and protecting the health of communities."

William Moss, project co-lead. senior advisor at the Johns Hopkins' International Vaccine Access Center and an epidemiologist at the Bloomberg School for Public Health

The tracker, developed through a collaboration between academia and public health, draws on the expertise of health department leaders and frontline practitioners to ensure it meets real-world public health needs. "We have carefully designed this effort with our public health partners to maximize the data's usefulness while maintaining non-identifiability and data security. We hope this can set the stage for a new paradigm for efficient and collaborative use of data for public health," said project co-lead Shaun Truelove, executive director of the Johns Hopkins' International Vaccine Access Center and an expert in infectious disease modeling with the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Data for the tracker is voluntarily provided by the health departments of participating jurisdictions. For non-participating states, the data comes from the CDC's National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System.

Collaborators at Johns Hopkins also include the Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence, the Data Science and AI Institute and the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science.