The power of the site is exposed when drilling down on an individual outbreak, to county, township or neighborhood level using the zoom feature of Google Maps.
Suppose you’re a public health official frustrated with the lack of clear visibility on the precise locations of specific infectious diseases around the world.
Or maybe you’re a jalapeño pepper importer and need to know the exact details of the latest salmonella outbreaks that possibly originated in Mexico this week.
Or maybe you’re traveling to China for the Olympics next month and are curious about the number and locations of cases of exotic diseases like dengue fever or avian flu found in the past 30 days at places on your itinerary in the Orient.
The power of HealthMap is exposed when drilling down on an individual outbreak, to county, township or neighborhood level using the zoom feature of Google Maps.
A new Web site called HealthMap is available to anyone interested in tracking emerging infectious diseases. The site is based on the belief that when the next anthrax, cholera or West Nile Virus outbreak occurs, the Internet will have the news first.
The system prowls endless Internet hallways eavesdropping on discussion forums, listservs and online news outlets for reports of infectious disease outbreaks around the world. The data is then aggregated by disease and displayed on the site’s global map by color-coded map tacks at each geographic location.
Click the tack to access the original alerts. The redder the tack, the “‘hotter” the alert. The hottest tack on July 21, for instance, was in Vietnam, where in the last 30 days there had been reports of anthrax, avian flu, blue ear (Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome), cholera and dengue fever, among others.
“Web‑based electronic information sources can play an important role in early event detection and support situational awareness by providing current, highly local information about outbreaks, even from areas relatively invisible to traditional global public health efforts,” said John Brownstein, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and cofounder, with Clark Freifeld, a software developer at Children’s Hospital Boston. of HealthMap.
HealthMap characterizes disease outbreak reports using a series of sophisticated text-mining algorithms. Essentially, HealthMap identifies disease and location, determines whether a given report refers to a current outbreak, and groups similar reports together. Duplicate reports are discarded.
The power of the site is exposed when drilling down on an individual outbreak, to county, township or neighborhood level using the zoom feature of Google Maps.
HealthMap focuses on providing users with news of immediate interest, while reducing information overload.
“Overwhelming public health officials with information on outbreaks of low public health impact may distract them from investigating outbreaks of greater priority that might receive reduced media attention,” Brownstein said. “Thus, only articles classified as breaking news are posted to the site.”