Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School have developed “HealthMap,” an automated data-mining project that searches web-accessible information sources to track emerging health threats worldwide.

HealthMap can often detect potential disease outbreaks in local pockets before health agencies such as the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) realize they’re threats.

It collects an average of 300 reports per day (using sources in five languages), and extracts disease and location information. It groups articles to provide collective information on any given outbreak, and calculates a “meta alert” activity score based on reliability of the data and the diversity of types of sources to reduce false positives.

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Mapping Infectious Diseases

Journal Article: Surveillance Sans Frontières: Internet-Based Emerging Infectious Disease Intelligence and the HealthMap Project