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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."
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...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
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.
"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.