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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."
Fascinating TED Talk on a similar (the same?) project? As I recall, some of video was a bit unpleasant to watch, but (IMHO) very worthwhile.
I'm a nature photographer.
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.
What the designers expect from this will highly color my opinion on it. The article linked isn't exactly clear on this.
Do you want to track and try and predict disease breakouts in first world areas then probably decent, track world wide stuff then terrible. Outside of the obvious (self reporting) there is the whole issue of how much of the world is on the internet? While much of the first and even quite a bit of the second world countries are on the vast majority of the population doesn't have computers, let alone internet access.
I can easily see many many great uses for this and I expect all of them to be explored at some point - I can also clearly see many not so great uses and I fully expect them to be used too. As the old saying goes, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
In fact we can already see the maps being posted and used by people who have little to no understanding (if we are generous, I'm sure some understand and use them to further their own aims) to say things the data *can not say* and it isn't even mainstream yet. *sigh* It's like many things we have today - the greater amount of good it can do the greater amount of abuse one can use it for too.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
It is not that I don't like the idea but it is essentially flawed.
A) It still requires human input. No one reporting the disease does not mean that it is not there.
Looking at former Yugoslavia and seeing only 1 case of meningitis while here in Bosnia everyone knows about (and it is on TV, radio and in the papers) the brucellosis epidemic that has been going on for months or even years maybe.
B) That input must be made over the internet.
Look at Africa. It is practically squeaky clean. There is one case diarrhea in the entire Botswana. And everyone is completely healthy up in the North.
Could it possibly be due to the lack of internet-based inputs instead of due to the lack of diseases?
Check out UK or the East Coast of USA. They are crawling with diseases.
C) It should preferably be in English. Can the crawler read any of these articles:
http://www.zzjzfbih.ba/content/view/66/13/
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,3259389,00.html?maca=bos-rss-bos-all-1475-rdf
http://www.slobodnadalmacija.hr/BiH/tabid/68/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/14733/Default.aspx
http://www.dnevniavaz.ba/dogadjaji/panorame/bruceloza-prepolovila-prodaju-livanjskog-sira-
http://www.blic.co.yu/repsrpska.php?id=44508
Basically, what they come to is that there is a SHITLOAD of cases of brucellosis among the various cattle in Bosnia.
And that it is going to stay that way for a long time, cause nobody is really doing anything about it.
It is a fine idea, but unless you have every square kilometer of Earth covered with internet access and people who will report it in a language that the crawler understands - it is beyond useless.
Even dangerous.
Zoom out over Asia and turn on the Google in Chinese under Feeds. China's disease count jumps from around 40 to around 140.
No. You can't fix all the problems by "putting it on the internet".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens