Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
health departments, governments, and multinational agencies (Brownstein
et al. 2008).
Another goal of the HealthMap program is to leverage nontraditional
sources of surveillance data. An enormous amount of valuable information
about infectious diseases is found in nontraditional Web-accessible infor-
mation sources such as discussion sites, disease reporting networks, and
news outlets. These resources often support situation awareness by provid-
ing current, highly localized information about outbreaks, even from areas
relatively invisible to traditional global public health efforts. The availability
of Web-based news media thus provides an alternative public health infor-
mation source in under-resourced areas. In addition, these data sources hold
tremendous potential to initiate epidemiologic follow-up studies, provide
complementary epidemic intelligence context to traditional surveillance
sources, and support increasing public awareness of disease outbreaks prior
to their formal recognition. Ultimately, the use of nontraditional sources
of surveillance data can provide an integrated and contextualized view of
global health information (Brownstein et al. 2008).
A third important goal of the system is to cover as broad a range of geog-
raphy and disease as possible, without bias toward particular regions or
pathogens. Since HealthMap currently relies heavily on the United States
edition of Google News for reports, the system is biased toward the United
States and Canada as well as other English-speaking countries around the
world. However, to address this problem, HealthMap has expanded to other
languages and data sources as resources have permitted (Freifeld et al. 2008).
Information is now also monitored in Chinese, Spanish, Russian, French,
Arabic, and Portuguese, with additional languages under development
(Brownstein et al. 2008). Through HealthMap's multistream approach, inte-
grating outbreak data from multiple electronic sources, HealthMap is able
to present a unified and comprehensive view of global infectious disease
outbreaks in space and time (Keller et al. 2009).
In regard to the range of pathogens, HealthMap was designed to obtain
comprehensive coverage of disease activity, encompassing diseases of animals
and plants, as well as some insect pests and other invasive species. This broad
disease coverage is of particular importance, as many infectious diseases of
public health concern are zoonotic, naturally circulating among wildlife reser-
voir hosts before emerging in the human population (Freifeld et al. 2008).
6.6 System Benefits
One important benefit of the HealthMap system is that it is a freely accessible,
automated resource. Whereas some systems are currently closed, requiring
either paid subscription or approved access, HealthMap is freely available
