Published 9 July 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a742
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a742

News

Internet crawler uses unconventional information sources to track infectious disease outbreaks

Susan Mayor

1 London

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

An automated data gathering system that crawls the internet to gather information from non-traditional sources such as online news outlets, discussion forums, and government websites is proving effective in tracking emerging infectious diseases, says a new study (PLoS Med 2008:5:e151 doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0050151).

Researchers from the Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School developed HealthMap as a freely accessible and automated system that monitors and organises information on emerging diseases in real time.

"Web-based sources can play an important role in early event detection . . . by providing current, highly local information about outbreaks, even from areas relatively invisible to traditional global public health efforts," they wrote.

The existing network of traditional surveillance systems managed by health organisations and multinational agencies has wide gaps in geographical coverage and often suffers from poor information flow across national borders, they say.

"At the same time," explained the study’s lead author, . . . [Full text of this article]


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