HealthMap

HealthMap is a freely accessible, automated electronic information system for monitoring, organizing, and visualizing reports of global disease outbreaks according to geography, time, and infectious disease agent.[1][2] In operation since September 2006, and created by John Brownstein, PhD and Clark Freifeld, PhD, HealthMap acquires data from a variety of freely available electronic media sources (e.g. ProMED-mail, Eurosurveillance, Wildlife Disease Information Node) to obtain a comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases.[3][4]

Users of HealthMap come from a variety of organizations including state and local public health agencies, the World Health Organization (WHO), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. HealthMap is used both as an early detection system and supports situational awareness by providing current, highly local information about outbreaks, even from areas relatively invisible to traditional global public health efforts. Currently, HealthMap monitors information sources in English, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, French, Portuguese, and Arabic.[5]

In March 2014, the Healthmap software tracked early press and social media reports of a hemorrhagic fever in West Africa, subsequently identified by WHO as Ebola. The HealthMap team subsequently created a dedicated HealthMap visualization at healthmap.org/ebola.[6][7]

As early as December 2019, HealthMap recorded a striking cluster of pneumonia cases in the Wuhan area, the suspected point of origin of the subsequent coronavirus pandemic.[8][9][10]

  1. ^ Brownstein JS, Freifeld CC, Reis BY, Mandl KD (2008) Surveillance Sans Frontières: Internet-Based Emerging Infectious Disease Intelligence and the HealthMap Project. PLoS Med 5(7): e151. [1] Archived 2008-08-09 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ Barclay E (2008). Predicting the next pandemic. Lancet.
  3. ^ Martin Enserink (2008) Google Grants Fight Disease. Science 322: 517.
  4. ^ Freifeld CC, Mandl KD, Reis BY, Brownstein JS (2007) HealthMap: Global infectious disease monitoring through automated classification and visualization of Internet media reports. J Am Med Inform Assoc. [2]
  5. ^ Nelson R (2008). HealthMap: the future of infectious diseases surveillance? Lancet Infect Dis 8: 596.
  6. ^ Associated Press (9 August 2014). "Online tool nailed Ebola epidemic". www.politico.com. Politico. Retrieved 10 August 2014.
  7. ^ "How an algorithm detected the Ebola outbreak a week early, and what it could do next". 26 August 2014. Retrieved 22 November 2014.
  8. ^ "Viral Pneumonia Infects Almost 60 in Central China | HealthMap". Archived from the original on 2020-04-10. Retrieved 2020-04-10.
  9. ^ "Coronavirus Researchers Are Using High-Tech Methods to Predict Where the Virus Might Go Next". 11 February 2020. Retrieved 2020-04-10.
  10. ^ "Epidemie-Früherkennung: Künstliche Intelligenz allein reicht nicht aus" (in German). 21 February 2020. Retrieved 2020-04-10. Das automatisierte HealthMap-System am Kinderkrankenhaus von Boston meldete, dass es in der chinesischen Stadt Wuhan Fälle einer unbekannten Lungenentzündung gebe. Das System, das Online-Nachrichten und Berichte auf Social Media scannt, gab dem Vorfall nur die Priorität drei auf einer bis fünf aufsteigenden Skala.