# 5497
It’s a busy world out there, with literally scores of disease outbreaks, disasters, and other significant events taking place every week.
Keeping track, and detecting trends, can be a full time job.
Luckily we’ve several handy disaster, crisis, and disease mapping websites that do a remarkable job in this regard.
Today, a brief review of four of them.
For versatility, and volume of reports, it’s hard to beat Healthmap.org’s Healthmap.
You can easily define the parameters to display, including disease types, locations, and information sources. You can view the world in either map or satellite view, and of course you can drill down and examine individual reports.
You’ll also find quick views of recent outbreaks or crises. Right now Japan, Antibiotic resistance, and Cholera in Haiti, and Measles are featured.
Healthmap began in 2006, and is fully interactive. I first wrote about HealthMap in July of 2008 (see HealthMap On The Web)
A relative newcomer that I profiled last February is the PREDICT MAP, an offshoot from the Healthmap (above), that focuses on zoonotic outbreaks of disease around the globe
A screen shot of the PREDICT map shows global areas currently of concern.
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.
A relatively new entry is the HEWS (Humanitarian Early Warning Service) developed by the United Nation’s WFP World Food Programme. The focus here are on disasters that can affect food security, including floods, storms, locusts, volcanoes, and earthquakes.
And lastly, a disease specific map that I visit often. Dengue Watch tracks this rapidly spreading arbovirus around the world.
I hit each one of these maps at least once a day, trolling for stories for this blog, or simply to keep up-to-date on events around the world.
Since many of these reports are culled from newspaper and media reports, and those sometimes are less than completely accurate, maintaining a level of Caveat Lector is recommended.
But if taken with that understanding, these maps can be extremely useful and illuminating tools.
And let’s face it. Getting real time updates from all around the world is pretty cool.
