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Doctors Turn To the Web For Disease Tracking

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the intertoobs-fix-everything dept.

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."

6 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Responses? by catbertscousin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So, if everyone on some large forum started talking about, say, measles, would the CDC show up at the server room and demand the names of the users so they can "contain the outbreak"?

    --
    No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
    1. Re:Responses? by philspear · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Measles? Probably not.

      Ebola or smallpox yes.

      I wiki'd smallpox and found out that in 2004, a librarian found an envelope from the civil war era marked "smallpox scabs" and the CDC showed up pretty quickly. So that shows 2 things
      1. The CDC would show up if you were bragging about having smallpox
      2. There were some sickos during the civil war. Saving smallpox scabs in an envelope?

    2. Re:Responses? by spasm · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "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.

  2. Statisticians have a saying... by Bazman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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.

  3. Re:Who'd of thunk by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 5, Interesting

    At the clinic I go to, they have a browser set up in each office. (And it's password protected, so you can't surf while you're waiting in the room for a half hour.) The neurologist is always whirling around and Googling stuff during the appointment. If he suggests a drug and I've heard people bitching about its side effects, I tell him and he does a quick Google search before suggesting something else. My wife's doctor, OTOH, disregards her own complaints of drug side effects that she's experiencing, and refuses to change the prescription. "I've never heard of that." They could open a five minute med school where they give you a 3G wireless Internet card, a DEA number, and then spend four minutes teaching you how to have an attitude.

  4. Re:Waving shiny objects by maxume · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's the best euphemism I have ever heard for hitting someone upside the head with an aluminum baseball bat.

    --
    Nerd rage is the funniest rage.