Other research groups [18, 19] have demonstrated the feasibility of using mortality data for real time surveillance but all used "free text" search for the string "pneumonia", "flu" or "influenza." As noted earlier, although this method can provide the semi quantitative measurements for disease surveillance purposes, keyword searches can also result in an array of problems that result from complexities of human language such as causal relationships and synonyms [20] . Therefore, the lack of coded death data that may not be available for months [21] seriously limits the use of death records in automated systems. At this time, there is little published on the automatic assignment of codes to death certificates for automatic case detection.