Outbreaks Near Me

In a new turn of technology fighting the spread of viruses (which have plagued organisms as long as living cells have existed), the free online information system HealthMap has introduced an also no-fee interactive iPhone app which collaborates with iPhone's GPS service to give you real-time outbreak information or alerts in your area as well as the ability to send in tips on outbreaks.


What's unique about this system is that it mines the internet and media to track diseases, taking into account official and unofficial sources. With the iPhone app, individuals worldwide can participate in disease surveillance.

The system covers data on over a hundred of the most common infectious diseases in 137 countries. Reuters estimated earlier this month that HealthMap's website averages 10,000 users a day but rose to 150,000 when the H1N1 swine flu epidemic broke out this spring.

HealthMap is directly funded by google.org and was created in 2006 by by John Brownstein, assistant professor at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program (CHIP), and Clark Freifeld, software developer at CHIP. The two first conceived of the idea of HealthMap after noticing that the earliest reports of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak came not from official laboratory or health reports, ministries and records but from local news media and similar unofficial reports.

To most, this might seem common sense. Yet our existing infectious disease surveillance networks largely rely on data gathered from official sources and agencies and therefore often suffer from surprisingly incomplete coverage and data flow (and this would explain why local reporters knew about SARS in the province of GuangDong, where it started, before officials did). HealthMap thus attempts to bridge this gap. According to their overview published in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) journal, HealthMap aggregates and filters through reports from 20,000 websites, averaging 300 reports a day with 85.1% of these sources being news media sources. The system then uses algorithms to determine the relevance and accuracy of reports.

Then in 2008, HealthMap received $3 million in funding from google.org to improve and expand HealthMap's coverage by intensifying collaborations with the Program of Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED), a network of the International Society for Infectious Diseases (ISID). At the time of the gift, Google.org had granted over $23 million in funding as part of its "Prepare & Prevent" initiative.

What's unique about their new app though, is that it's completely ad-free and so isn't making any money from this when it seems they could be making a lot (although they do make it very clear on their website and the app about their Google support). I really scoured for information on a breakdown of how they are using this grant, but aside from vague focus points, there is really nothing on whether they intend to keep this nonprofit afloat on pure donations or simply Google.

I have no idea why they wouldn't go the ad way but maybe it's to save screen space so you can be fully alert to the newly-infected swine flu cases exploding viruses just a couple blocks next to you, who knows. In any case, HealthMap is proven to be widely used so getting users isn't an issue (which I think is really the major obstacle for any business), especially in this environment of hand-sanitizer-loving paranoia, so I would be very interested in seeing how this model plays out.