Comprehensive data on pneumonia incidence and mortality are essential for monitoring disease trends, guiding policy decisions, and prioritizing disease prevention and control strategies. For China, accurate information on the incidence and mortality of pneumonia, as well as data on cost, will be central for planning the addition of new vaccines to routine childhood immunization programs. Also, seasonal and pandemic influenza remain ever present global threats. Continued surveillance and consideration of influenza vaccination and other control measures are needed. In collaboration with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), China's CDC is implementing active, population-based surveillance for pneumonia in certain areas using a standard approach and case definitions. The surveillance system will aim to better define pneumonia incidence, identify etiologies, and guide important clinical and public health decisions. Increased laboratory capacity needs to be built to ensure continued rigorous surveillance and quick response to emerging threats. Together these improved surveillance and laboratory data should help improve detection, prevention and control of pneumonia throughout China.  On the possible role of robustness in the evolution of infectious diseases Robustness describes the capacity for a biological system to remain canalized despite perturbation. Genetic robustness affords maintenance of phenotype despite mutational input, necessarily involving the role of epistasis. Environmental robustness is phenotypic constancy in the face of environmental variation, where epistasis may be uninvolved. Here we discuss genetic and environmental robustness, from the standpoint of infectious disease evolution, and suggest that robustness may be a unifying principle for understanding how different disease agents evolve. We focus especially on viruses with RNA genomes due to their importance in the evolution of emerging diseases and as model systems to test robustness theory. We present new data on adaptive constraints for a model RNA virus challenged to evolve in response to UV radiation. We also draw attention to other infectious disease systems where robustness theory may prove useful for bridging evolutionary biology and biomedicine, especially the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, immune evasion by influenza, and malaria parasite infections. In biology, robustness describes the relative capacity for a biological system to maintain constancy of phenotype ͑e.g., population growth, individual development͒, despite perturbation by mutation ͑genetic robustness͒ or by environmental change ͑environmental robustness͒. [1] [2] [3] [4] Epistasis is implicit in genetic robustness; a robust genome tends to retain phenotype when a mutation is introduced, whereas the identical mutation is expected to typically alter phenotype when placed in a brittle ͑nonrobust͒ genetic background. Both types of robustness are central to evolutionary biology because robustness dictates how organisms respond to environmental challenges, the very crux of natural selection.