Flu flow: HealthMap, created by Google and the CDC, annotates a global map with news articles, official medical alerts, and other data in real time.
Credit: Google
Google
Tracking and communications could play a key role in combating a pandemic.
The World Health Organization (WHO) admitted on Tuesday that it's too late to contain swine flu, and experts say that it is now vital to track the spread of the virus in order to mitigate its effects. Vaccines and antivirals will be crucial to the effort, but tracking and communications technologies could also play a key role in monitoring the virus, distributing accurate health information, and quelling outbreaks.
Bloggers and social-networking sites were among the first to follow the outbreak's rapid spread from its epicenter in Mexico--where swine flu has been linked to more than 150 deaths--to cities across the United States and on to Europe, Israel, and New Zealand.
The need for fast information has seen the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) build up a large following on Twitter. Groups ranging from fellow federal institutions, such as the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, to local Red Cross divisions, as well as many regular Twitter users, are employing the service to receive updates. Some experts, however, warn that Twitter can just as easily spread misinformation and panic. According to data from the medical tracking site Nielson, conversations related to swine flu reached 2 percent of all messages on Twitter over the weekend. By contrast, Google's Flu Trends, a site that aims to spot flu outbreaks by monitoring search queries related to flu symptoms and treatment, has shown little increase in activity in recent days.
Some Twitter users have also been criticized for spreading misinformation by, for example, warning friends and followers against eating pork, which is not related to the spread of swine flu. Evgeny Morozov, a fellow at the Open Society Institute, in New York, wrote in a blog post on Saturday, "Having millions of people wrap up all their fears into 140 characters and blurt them out in the public might have some dangerous consequences, networked panic being one of them."
Meanwhile, other Internet tools are helping to track the spread of the virus geographically. HealthMap, which was created by researchers from Children's Hospital Boston with support from Google, the CDC, the National Library of Medicine, and the Canadian Institute of Health Research, adds real-time news alerts, official medical information, and other data to a global tracking map.
Susan Perkins, a specialist in microbial evolution at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, NY, who has previously applied geographical information systems to the study of how viruses evolve, hopes that Internet technology and "the new field of info-epidemiology" can make a difference in future epidemics, if not in the current swine-flu outbreak. "Sites like HealthMap or Google Earth are a good new way to visualize data," she says. "These readily accessible platforms also let people in diverse fields--public health, evolutionary biology, et cetera--share the same information."
Perkins believes that being able to process viral genomes more quickly could make a big difference: "In the future, I would hope that diseases will be able to be better tracked with software that can combine genomic information with real geographic information. That will give us the most power to solve--and then hopefully break--transmission patterns."
Scientists are exploring faster approaches to making vaccines against the H1N1 virus.
Looking at the disease worldwide allows scientists to track efforts to fight it.
Contrary to certain assertions, the fact is Twitter has provided a lot of valuable information to many people in a rapid manner. In particular, and by way of example, check out the information from these Swine Flu Tweeters at Twitter - @interoperable, @Everybodysafe, or @gfriese, to name a few.
For an article of the potential benefits and uses of Twitter for Emergency Management also visit http://preparednesstoday.blogspot.com.
As with any open communications medium there is a likelihood that misinformation will be disseminated and shared, but that is no different from the local gossip transmitted one haircut at a time at the local barbershop.
CDC reports are not comprehensive
It is worth stating that the only cases the CDC is reporting are confirmed cases. A much more comprehensive mapping of suspected and confirmed cases is happening here: http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com
This FluTracker may be one of the only sources mapping the locations of suspected and confirmed cases, as opposed to the HealthMap which just maps out articles that mention flu and places.
-josh
I've posted some good resources to the Earth Intelligence Network Twitter feed http://twitter.com/earthintelnet
Most recently, from the National Library of Medicine.
Jason Liszkiewicz
Executive Director (NYC), Earth Intelligence Network 501(c)3
Public Intelligence in the Public Interest
www.earth-intelligence.net
EIN Twitter Feed
Cyber Scout Hyper Link-Table
Free Collective Intelligence Book
http://re-configure.org
http://smart-city.re-configure.org
Seems like an ideal opportunity to validate models that have been generated and studied for years. If the correlations are good, the patterns of occurence should be predictable, and subsequently observable. Otherwise, perhaps we should reconsider the value of many academic models of the environment?
Real-Time Syndromic Surveillance
Prehospital emergency medical services dispatchers in 9-1-1 (or equivalent) communications systems in many cities around the world use a system called FirstWatch (www.firstwatch.net). "From pandemic disease outbreaks to bioterrorism, FirstWatch provides real-time situational awareness Dashboards and Data Analysis to Public Health and Public Safety teams by automatically detecting potentially threatening trends, patterns or geographic clusters of occurrences as they develop."
9-1-1 dispatchers interrogate callers to determine what resources to send and provide appropriate first-aid instructions over the phone before paramedics arrive. They are following algorithmic scripts based on patient symptoms and circumstances. The information reveals what types of symptoms the patient has. Certain patterns of clusters of symptoms point to different categories of problems. Seeing these patterns in non-random distributions, geographically or temporally, triggers alerts to emergency and public health system managers.
This is useful for early real-time detection of both natural and bio-terrorism disease situations.
--- Mic
Mic Gunderson
President, IPS
Public Safety Consultant
Everyday, this website compiled using data from official sources, news reports...
> Grippe A H1N1
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1 Comment
Tracking virus or news stories
"other Internet tools are helping to track the spread of the virus geographically. HealthMap,"
Flag shows up in AZ but it is a story written about the virus. No outbreak here, yet. Same with other points. One would think with the above comment that by selecting a disease that the location of those would be shown.
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