Monday, October 25, 2010

Healthmap Snapshot of Cholera In Haiti

 

 

 

# 5009

 

 

Although Crof at Crofsblog  has been doing the heavy lifting on the Cholera story out of Haiti, a tweet this morning on the  outbreak by @sukitink sent me to the constantly updated Healthmap project , which pinpoints reported cases of infectious disease all over the world.

 

Frankly, I should have thought of it on my own, since I’ve used this resource in the past.

 

Healthmap.org describes their free service this way.

 

About HealthMap

HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health.

This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert.

 

I’ve written about Healthmap often in the past, and have a link to it in my sidebar (see Healthmap.org: Charting Dengue’s Progress, Study: Unstructured Event-Based Global Infectious Disease Surveillance Systems and HealthMap On The Web.)

 

The front page of the Healthmap has a one-click button to bring up the latest reports – including scrolling news items – from Haiti.

 

 image .

You can see a closer view of the outbreak reports below. On the Healthmap page, each pin is clickable, and will bring up the associated report.  You can also impose filters to show or hide various aspects of the map.

 

image

 


Whether you are keeping track of Cholera in Haiti, Bird Flu in Indonesia, or the march of Dengue around the world – Healthmap.org provides a valuable and easy to use tool to analyze each outbreak.