The role of occupational health clinics in surveillance of occupational disease.

Academic occupational health centers can support state-based occupational disease surveillance by playing a role in case identification and management, physician education, workplace investigation, and surveillance case criteria development. The existing centers can also serve as models for developing new clinics. As plans for developing surveillance continue, the role of these centers should be explicitly defined, and they should be included in helping to develop mechanisms for reporting. In all these ways, the centers can significantly enhance the development of a national surveillance system for occupational disease.