Avian Flu Diary: PREDICT: A Global Healthmap Of Zoonotic Disease

# 5297

Readers of this blog are no doubt familiar with Healthmap.org’s continually updated maps of disease outbreaks around the world.

I’ve used them often in my research, and have written about them numerous times, including (Healthmap.org: Charting Dengue’s Progress, Study: Unstructured Event-Based Global Infectious Disease Surveillance Systems and HealthMap On The Web.)

Via DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. of the New York Times, we learn of a new offshoot of the healthmap project (hat tip Tetano on FluTrackers) that focuses on zoonotic outbreaks of disease around the globe.

Outbreaks: A Tool to Track Animal Diseases May Help to Protect Humans

VIENNA — A new online mapping tool will enable scientists and the public to track outbreaks of animal diseases that might jump to humans.

(Continue . . .)

From the PREDICT Home page of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, we get this description.

PREDICT: Building a global early warning system for emerging diseases that move between wildlife and people.

In order to predict, respond to, and prevent the emergence of novel infectious diseases in humans, pathogens must be identified at their source. Explosive human population growth and environmental changes have resulted in increased numbers of people living in close contact with animals. Unfortunately the resulting increase in contact, together with changes in land use, has altered the inherent ecological balance between pathogens and their human and animal hosts.

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PREDICT project objectives:

Assess local surveillance capacity;

Implement targeted and adaptive wildlife disease surveillance systems;

Develop and deliver new technologies to improve efforts close to the source;

Use cutting-edge information management and communication tools to bring the world closer to realizing an integrated, global approach to emerging zoonotic diseases.