A NEW ONLINE automated surveillance tool called Healthmap reckons it can give users an accurate, real-time view of infectious disease outbreaks, based on information from Internet news sites and World Health Organization alerts.

Using text-processing algorithms, Health map apparently forages around the net looking through thousands of web sites in six different languages, public-health listservs and more to try and hunt down the latest health scare, which it then pins onto a virtual map.

The software used is purportedly built in such a way that it can differentiate between breaking news on an outbreak of foot and mouth disease, and articles about sticking one’s foot in one’s mouth. Co-founder of Healthmap, John Brownstein, reckons the software gets it right about 95 per cent of the time, and suggests that globetrotters use the map as a resource to see whether a nasty case of cholera might have just broken out in their chosen holiday location.

Want to know where the best place for catching a spot of Salmonella this summer is? Try New England USA. Don’t fancy a dollop of bird flu? Stay away from the UK, according to Healthmap. E.coli? Sweden is a hot-bed of it. Strangely enough, North Africa, South America, and the Middle East are fairly disease free, compared to the disease ridden cesspots of Western Europe and the USA.

We have a sneaking suspicion this is down to the rather dodgy methodology of the site. Tracking the media reports of disease outbreaks (especially online media reporting), tends to be a bit difficult if there is little to no communications infrastructure present, which may explain why the jungles of South America and Africa, for instance, seem so disease free.

But Healthmap doesn’t seem too concerned about making Algeria look like a health haven whilst making Britain look worse than it did during the bubonic plague.

Instead, Durland Fish, an epidemiologist at Yale School of Public Health, in New Haven who previously worked with the site’s founder told Technology Review it could even give public-health officials useful tools for identifying and intervening in the outbreak of viruses before they become critical. "We would be able to identify where this virus is likely to emerge in humans," says Fish. " Once we get the first human case, we would know the virus has made the jump. That's presumably what happened with SARS."µ

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Technology Review