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How A Computer Algorithm Predicted West Africa’s Ebola Outbreak Before It Was Announc

  • 11-08-2014 07:26PM
    #1
    Rucking_Fetard
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,260 ✭✭✭


    The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is focusing a spotlight on a unique online tool run by experts in Boston that flagged a “mystery hemorrhagic fever” in forested areas of southeastern Guinea nine days before the World Health Organization formally announced the epidemic.

    HealthMap is an innovative tool that uses algorithms to scour tens of thousands of social media sites, local news, government websites, infectious-disease physicians’ social networks, and other sources to detect and track disease outbreaks. Sophisticated software filters irrelevant data, classifies the relevant information, identifies diseases and maps their locations with the help of experts.


    The site is run by a group of 45 researchers, epidemiologists, and software developers at BCH. HealthMap was first introduced in 2006 with a core audience of public health specialists, but that changed as the system evolved and the public became increasingly hungry for information during the swine flu pandemic.


    While public health workers still make up a large proportion of users, HealthMap has been adapted to be more user-friendly for the general public. It locates the outbreaks on a world map and creates a color-coding system that indicates the severity of an outbreak on the basis of news reportage about it. Users of the site can then analyze and visualize the data, gaining unprecedented views of disease outbreaks. Here’s what the output looks like:






    http://publichealthwatch.wordpress.com/2014/08/10/how-a-computer-algorithm-predicted-west-africas-ebola-outbreak-before-it-was-announced/


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