Avian Flu Diary: HealthMap Redux

# 2166

Yesterday I did a quickie blog on the HealthMap project.

This morning I discovered that one of my favorite writers, Maryn McKenna, wrote an excellent backgrounder on HealthMap - and other projects that are using the Internet as an early disease warning system - for CIDRAP News.

I'll just post a snippet. Follow the link to read the entire article.

More efforts look outside the box for outbreak signals

Maryn McKenna Contributing Writer
Jul 21, 2008 (CIDRAP News) – In the history of infectious diseases, coincidence plays an extraordinary role. In 1706, Cotton Mather purchased a slave named Onesimus who happened to come from a tribe that practiced variolation, and so smallpox prevention was introduced to North America. In 1928, Alexander Fleming happened to leave a window open in his laboratory, and the contaminants that drifted into a dish of Staphylococcus aureus provided the raw material for the discovery of penicillin.

And in February 2003, a never-identified man in southern China emailed a query to an American teacher he knew from an Internet chat room, who happened to have been the neighbor of a US Navy epidemiologist. The epidemiologist, Dr. Stephen Cunnion, placed the relayed note on the electronic mailing list ProMED—and so the first notice of the international SARS epidemic was brought to the world, weeks before the Chinese government admitted the disease's existence.

Five years on, the example of that relayed note has inspired a broad-based effort to take the coincidence out of outbreak notification. It seeks to do by design what the never-named writer accomplished by happenstance: tap nontraditional sources of information, find and verify the earliest possible news of disease outbreaks, publicize the outbreaks, and possibly help contain them.

Dr. Larry Brilliant, one of the chiefs of the World Health Organization's (WHO's) smallpox-eradication effort and now executive director of the philanthropy Google.org, has dubbed the effort "two steps to the left"—meaning two steps backward on an epidemic curve, when an outbreak is much harder to detect but easier to control or contain.

(Continue reading . . . )