Web-Crawling Program Spots Disease Outbreaks

no1home writes "There is a story at Discovery Channel's site about a new utility for mapping disease. The premise is to have bots crawl the web looking for stories about disease outbreaks and log them onto a map. '"We were originally thinking about how we could expand disease surveillance and pick up outbreaks earlier than traditional methods," said John Brownstein of Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston, who created HealthMap in September of 2006 with Clark Friefeld, a software developer at Harvard Medical School.' But then it was noticed by Google.org and has since grown into its own website, HealthMap Global disease alert map, and claims to be able to identify 95% of all disease outbreaks, some of them before WHO or CDC."

Comments

Just what the insurance companies need

[Morgaine]

> one could even "out" symptoms of their friends or speculate which friends made them sick. lots of issues with it, but a different data source for inf disease folks, even if the data was not completely accurate, would be helpful in predictions.

Yeah, right, just what we need, an inaccurate resource for the insurance companies to data-mine. Your premium has now increased by a factor of 5, just because someone with your name (Mike Smith) allegedly made someone else sick. Great.

No thanks.

This thing has one flaw

[AndGodSed]

as far as I can make out. It relies heavily on human reporting. And sometimes it takes a while for news on disease outbreaks to make the news.

Unless there is some way to report directly TO this crawler, I seriously doubt the claim that a web crawler can know of outbreaks before the WHO does.

hmm... I just referenced The Who - a band...

Usefulness?

[Ender_Wiggin]

The CDC, and local and state health departments all have a list of "reportable" diseases. (Things from TB to gonnorhea to ebola to SARS) If a doctor encounters them, they are supposed to notify the health authorities. That is for biostatistics and epidemiology purposes.

If they have to look these cases up in the news instead of getting notified by hospitals and clinics, then the system is in a really bad shape.

Re:Usefulness?

[symes]

If they have to look these cases up in the news instead of getting notified by hospitals and clinics, then the system is in a really bad shape.

Very true - but might there be value in understanding the public's awareness of disease? One thing that this map might measure is a communitites awareness of transmissible disease and awareness *should* lead to protective behaviour. So if there's a mismatch between regular epidemiological stats and this map then perhaps public health bods should going in there telling people to wear condoms, wash their hands, etc.

Re:Usefulness?

[jamesh]

The CDC, and local and state health departments all have a list of "reportable" diseases. (Things from TB to gonnorhea to ebola to SARS) If a doctor encounters them, they are supposed to notify the health authorities. That is for biostatistics and epidemiology purposes.

What about non-reportable diseases? German Measles, Chicken Pox, and many others are not reportable, and most people wouldn't even bother going to the doctor if their kids came down with them (or is that not the case anymore? seems like everyone goes running to the doctor at the slightest hint of being unwell these days...)

If the local news picked up on the latest round of Chicken Pox then this program might be able to pick up on it.

I wonder if this Slashdot article is being reported on right now - google seems incredibly quick these days!

Re:Neat

[kaos07]

"It'll be pretty obvious that communitites not tied to the www 24/7 will be sorely under-represented."

And those are the communities which have the highest outbreaks of disease... So it seems pretty pointless to me.