Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 6.4
HealthMap Situation Awareness Window. (From http://www.healthmap.org. Clark Freifield
and John Brownstein. 8/21/2009. With permission.)
All articles related to a given outbreak are aggregated by text similarity matching in order to
provide a situation awareness report. Furthermore, other outbreaks occurring in the same geo-
graphic area or involving the same pathogen are provided. The window also provides links to
further research on the subject. In this example, we show pertinent information relating to the
diseases (arian influenza, polio, e.coli, and yellow fever) and locations (Egypt and Mongolia)
in original alert.
to serve public health authorities, infectious disease Web sites that serve
the general public are increasing in popularity. These sites are helping to
increase awareness of public health issues, especially for international trav-
elers. As part of this new generation of online resources, HealthMap brings
together automated processing of a broad range of Internet data sources and
rich, accessible visualization tools for laypeople and public health profession-
als alike (Freifeld et al. 2008). The HealthMap system is currently utilized
as a direct information source for libraries, schools of public health, local
