Doctors Turn To the Web For Disease Tracking

schliz writes "US researchers believe that data from sources including discussion forums and news websites can help them better cope with outbreaks of disease. The team from the Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School has launched an automated data-gathering system called HealthMap to collate, organize and disseminate this online intelligence. The team argues that online information can be hugely valuable to medical professionals by helping with early event detection. The data can also support 'situational awareness' by providing current and local information about outbreaks."

Comments

Statisticians have a saying...

[Bazman]

"The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'." It's even worse when those anecdotes are culled from miscellaneous websites, unreliably geocoded, and possibly multiply reported.

Re:Responses?

[spasm]

"2. There were some sickos during the civil war. Saving smallpox scabs in an envelope?"

Grinding up smallpox scabs and jabbing them into your skin used to be how you inoculated people for smallpox before the cowpox vaccination was invented/discovered. So collecting the scabs from people who had recently had it was a pretty common practice.