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. In operation since September 2006, and created by
John Brownstein
John Brownstein is a Canadian epidemiologist and Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School as well as the Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children’s Hospital. His research focuses on development of computational methods in epidem ...
, PhD and
Clark Freifeld
Clark is an English language surname, ultimately derived from the Latin with historical links to England, Scotland, and Ireland ''clericus'' meaning "scribe", "secretary" or a scholar within a religious order, referring to someone who was educate ...
, PhD, HealthMap acquires data from a variety of freely available electronic media sources (e.g.
ProMED-mail
Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (also known as ProMED-mail, abbreviated ProMED) is among the largest publicly available emerging diseases and outbreak reporting systems in the world. The purpose of ProMED is to promote communication amon ...
,
Eurosurveillance
''Eurosurveillance'' (''Euro surveillance : bulletin Européen sur les maladies transmissibles'', "European communicable disease bulletin") is an open-access medical journal covering epidemiology, surveillance, prevention and control of communi ...
,
Wildlife Disease Information Node
Wildlife refers to undomesticated animal species, but has come to include all organisms that grow or live wild in an area without being introduced by humans. Wildlife was also synonymous to game: those birds and mammals that were hunted fo ...
) to obtain a comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases.
Users of HealthMap come from a variety of organizations including state and local public health agencies, the
World Health Organization
The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. The WHO Constitution states its main objective as "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level o ...
(WHO), the US
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the national public health agency of the United States. It is a United States federal agency, under the Department of Health and Human Services, and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georg ...
, and the
European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. HealthMap is used both as an early detection system and supports
situational awareness
Situational awareness or situation awareness (SA) is the perception of environmental elements and events with respect to time or space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their future status. An alternative definition is tha ...
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.
In March 2014, the Healthmap software tracked early press and social media reports of a
hemorrhagic fever
Viral hemorrhagic fevers (VHFs) are a diverse group of animal and human illnesses in which fever and hemorrhage are caused by a viral infection. VHFs may be caused by five distinct families of RNA viruses: the families '' Filoviridae'', '' ...
in West Africa, subsequently identified by
WHO
Who or WHO may refer to:
* Who (pronoun), an interrogative or relative pronoun
* Who?, one of the Five Ws in journalism
* World Health Organization
Arts and entertainment Fictional characters
* Who, a creature in the Dr. Seuss book '' Horton He ...
as
Ebola
Ebola, also known as Ebola virus disease (EVD) and Ebola hemorrhagic fever (EHF), is a viral hemorrhagic fever in humans and other primates, caused by ebolaviruses. Symptoms typically start anywhere between two days and three weeks after becom ...
. The HealthMap team subsequently created a dedicated HealthMap visualization a
healthmap.org/ebola
See also
*
Crowdmapping Crowdmapping is a subtype of crowdsourcing by which aggregation of crowd-generated inputs such as captured communications and social media feeds are combined with geographic data to create a digital map that is as up-to-date as possible on events ...
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Healthmap
Epidemiology
World Health Organization
Public health and biosurveillance software