PoliGazette » The Disease Finding Robot

The Disease Finding Robot

Filed under: Health, Internet — Michael Merritt on July 19, 2008 @ 9:32 am CEST

I hope Michael will forgive me for a little bit of news unrelated to politics, though it is in some ways loosely related. I just feel everyone should know about this amazing program.

I was just looking at some of the latest Digg headlines, when I noticed this article about a web crawling bot that scours the Internet looking for outbreaks of disease around the world.

Most people know that most web crawling bots take what they find and then bring them back to a web search server to compile a list of results found by keywords. How companies do this varies, and they all have their own algorithms.

Likewise, HealthMap scours the Internet to find what may be reports of an outbreak happening somewhere in the world, and then brings it back to scientists and health professionals, who can then try to do something about it before it gets too bad:

HealthMap gathers information from the Internet and filters it, removing, for example, duplicated or irrelevant information. It can pinpoint an incident of bubonic plague in Siberia, for example, while ensuring that a “plague” of home foreclosures in northern California doesn’t show up on the free access Google Maps.

So, why does this program matter? After all, governments and NGOs all around the world have protocols that identify outbreaks, right?

So far the program identifies about 95 percent of all disease outbreaks, sometimes days before the World Health Organization or the Centers of Disease Control announce them.

A recent example:

The most recent example of this is the ongoing salmonella outbreak in the United States that has sickened more than 1,000 people and the cause of which is still unknown. HealthMap detected the outbreak before the CDC announced anything.

The developers have now made a partnership with Google, which has allowed this program to take off. They’ll be constantly improving it, hoping to get into some other sources of communication, such as chatrooms.

I think this is all pretty exciting. It doesn’t help rid the world of cancer or anything, but if this can help doctors deal with outbreaks more quickly, it’s worth it. Imagine if we had this during the SARS outbreak in 2002-2003. Perhaps China wouldn’t have been able to cover it up for so long, and not as many people would have been died from it.

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