An Epidemiological Surveillance System to Monitor the Prevalence of Youth Behaviors That Most Affect Health

This article discusses 5 reasons for creating the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System: to focus efforts of relevant agencies on behaviors formed in youth that cause the most mortality, to assess the stability of these behaviors over time, to provide comparable data across 6 categories of behavior, to provide comparable national, state & local data, & to provide means to monitor relevant National Health Objectives for the year 2000. (7 refs)