(Disease Map) regularly scans the news sites, medical reports and the World Health Organization (WHO) web pages in six languages, thus tracking disease outbreaks, and is updated hourly.
“We were thinking about how we could improve the traditional surveillance system for mass diseases to learn about them faster than possible using traditional methods,” says John Brownstein of the Children’s Hospital in Boston, author of HealthMap.
HealthMap collects information from the Internet and filters it thoroughly, eliminating duplicate or inaccurate data. For example, the program distinguishes reports of cases of bubonic plague from the “plague” referred to in different contexts in a figurative sense. Thus, the program tracks 95% of disease outbreaks several days before they are announced by WHO or the Centers for Disease Control.
HealthMap will be useful not only for doctors, but also for travel enthusiasts, as it helps to choose a safer route. In the near future it is planned to improve it by attracting new information resources.