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Online Tool Flagged Ebola Outbreak Before Formal WHO Announcement
Taco Cowboy (5327) writes Nine days before the announcement from WHO regarding the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, an online tool had the incident flagged. HealthMap, a team of 45 researchers, epidemiologists and software developers at Boston Children's Hospital founded in 2006, hosting an online tool that uses algorithms to scour tens of thousands of social media sites, local news, government websites, infectious-disease physicians' social networks and other sources to detect and track disease outbreaks. Sophisticated software filters irrelevant data, classifies the relevant information, identifies diseases and maps their locations with the help of experts. The tool was introduced in 2006 with a core audience of public health specialists, but that changed as the system evolved and the public became increasingly hungry for information during the swine flu pandemic. To get a feel of how HealthMap works, in the case of the Ebola outbreak, visit the site.
I bet the Doctor knew about this years ago, since he can travel in time
Look what it hath rot
If it can make these kinds of predictions without a tonne of false positives, then we have something we can call a tool - otherwise it's just a more efficient but no more reliable form of gossip and rumour.
This app has been around for ages. It's called a tin foil hat.
The Ebola outbreak, the largest and longest ever recorded for the disease, has so far killed more than 950 people.
950?
Compared to other things like traffic fatalities (33,561 - 2012) it's nothing.
But, Ebola is making all the news.
My 90 year-old grandmother who reads the newspaper every day figured this out 10 days before the WHO announcement.
Maybe Healthmap should hire her as a consultant to get an edge on future outbreaks.
This App reports on symptoms and could be very useful to the WHO to determine where they need to look for outbreaks. It do NOT verify , as the WHO, does that a particular disease or strain.
Go to the site. Click to the head of the timeline. Look:
So, if you label the "mystery hemorrhagic fever" as ebola, after the fact or without waiting for confirmatory tests, you too can beat the WHO by 9 days.
If you ignore that the WHO's detection regime is the one that has doctors and hospitals sending samples laboratories for confirmatory testing, you too can beat the WHO by 9 days.
If your algorithm identifies dengue fever as ebola based upon "tens of thousands of social media sites, local news, government websites, infectious-disease physicians' social networks and other sources," keep quiet about the fact. Announce your success four months after everyone is sure that it is what you think it is to avoid embarrassing press releases.
This does not appear to be early epidemiological detection by connecting the social-media-dots. This is jumping-the-gun based on early reporting of the processes of an existing early detection program.
TFA doesn't make this clear which WHO announcement this tool is being compared to, which makes it really hard to judge the effectiveness of HealthMap.
The WHO declared the Ebola outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern only 2 days ago on August 8th. However I am not aware - nor can I find - any record of the WHO declaring an epidemic, as TFA states. (Does the WHO even declare epidemics?)
If HealthMap is being compared to the PHEIC announcement, then for all practical purposes its useless as this outbreak has been going on for some number of weeks now. More likely HealthMap is being compared to an earlier WHO announcement, but without knowing exactly when that is, there's no way to tell if the HealthMap analysis would have actually been of any use.
367 in Guinea? What about 15K deaths of pneumonia and influenza in the same area? And this happens every f*n year!
Globally? Pneumonia kills 1.8 million children every year.
Even in USA, more people are dying of pneumonia and influenza per month http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/overview.htm#Mortality
I do not see any global hysteria caused by this!
250 000 to 500 000 deaths per year globally.
5-8% of all deaths in USA
Anyone can flag a lot of shit. The question is how many of the flagging is meaningful and how much of it is like stuff you see on Drudge Report.
In other words how many false positives were output along with this?
One successful detection of an outbreak is meaningless. This is like how everybody claimed frogs had predicted the earthquake in China a few years ago.
To judge the success of this system, we need three pieces of information:
* How many outbreaks has this system actually flagged?
* How many outbreaks has this system missed (false negatives)?
* How many outbreaks has this system flagged that turned out not to be (false positives)?
Not many to find, but here's a source that at least has a date in it.
An official declaration of an epidemic has all sorts of effects and consequences. Not to taken lightly. I'm not sure how the decision making works, but Public Health tends to err on the side of making sure they have an epidemic rather than declaring one that isn't.
By the way, I am a practicing chiropractor. I treat patients who have the flu for simultaneous conditions, or for supportive or symptomatic relief or other consequences. Being bedridden causes sore backs; coughing throws ribs out of place, I can do respiratory percussion to help drain lungs, etc. Or I can tell patients when they need to see an MD or go to the ER. This leads up to my point: I can usually tell when we are in a flu epidemic about 2-4 weeks before the official announcement. Any health care provider who sees the general population can. Also anyone in day care, grade school teachers, barbers, or other close physical contact can. The flu is another example of the 'slowness' of announcing official epidemics.
Just stay out of negroid areas, especially nations. Safety in all categories rises 1000%
A bit more precisely, WHO publicly announced an Ebola outbreak the day following confirmation that Ebola virus was the cause of the observed hemorrhagic fever.