John Brownstein and Clark Friefeld from Harvard Medical School created the website HealthMap to visually chart diseases. HealthMap was started in September of 2006, but really took off once Google.org threw their philanthropic weight behind the project. By trolling hundreds of sites, HealthMap is able to not only give an accurate listing of outbreaks, but often times makes official announcements earlier than big organizations do. From an individual’s perspective, the information may be a bit alarming, but the goal of the project is to better inform the medical community by helping them act quickly on potentially serious outbreaks. The Discovery Channel was able to interview the founders and explains:
Every hour, HealthMap… culls through news Web sites, public health list servs, the World Health Organization’s online pages, and other Web sites in six different languages to pinpoint outbreaks of disease that real-world doctors can then act on.
[via Discovery News]
