ebola cola

Brain boxes at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School (Where else?) have recently developed a nifty little web tool called HealthMap. HealthMap gathers and utilises information from the world wide web to accumulate information on outbreaks of diseases, and pinpoints their exact location on a big worldwide map.

Or as they say over at Harvard, it is a ”multi-stream real-time surveillance platform that continually aggregates reports on new and ongoing infectious disease outbreaks”.

The developers hope that the use of HealthMap will help  ”facilitate early outbreak detection, increase public awareness of outbreaks prior to formal recognition, and provide an integrated and contextualised view of global health information”.

In the example to the right, I searched for recent cases of the disease that shares the first half of this sites name; Ebola. Through search criteria, HealthMap was able to tell me that one unlucky guy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, slap bang in the middle of Africa - was displaying suspected symptoms of Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever. Very cool stuff but way cooler if you’re a researcher. Not so great if you’re the poor guy with ebola.

HealthMap.org. Another great example of science utilising the web for what it was meant for.

“Bitchin”, as House would say.

If there is anything with this article that is wrong, I will be happy to hear from you.