Taiwan's Mortality Information Regulations require medical institutions to report any mortality to DOH through the National Death Certificate System (NDCS) within 7 days after a death certification is issued. Automated data from the NDCS were daily submitted to TCDC by secure electronic transmission and processed and analyzed using SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3 (SAS Institute Inc, Cary, NC). For each report, the underlying cause of death was determined by applying the World Health Organization classification principles (2) and searched for freetext traditional Chinese 'pneumonia', 'influenza', or 'flu' to identify P&I deaths. Reporting timeliness and completeness of this surveillance system was assessed by comparing reporting data with post-hoc mortality statistics for the year of 2008. We used an R-package 'surveillance' to detect aberrations in the P&I mortality weekly data (3) .