Web-Crawling Program Spots Disease Outbreaks

no1home writes "There is a story at Discovery Channel's site about a new utility for mapping disease. The premise is to have bots crawl the web looking for stories about disease outbreaks and log them onto a map. '"We were originally thinking about how we could expand disease surveillance and pick up outbreaks earlier than traditional methods," said John Brownstein of Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston, who created HealthMap in September of 2006 with Clark Friefeld, a software developer at Harvard Medical School.' But then it was noticed by Google.org and has since grown into its own website, HealthMap Global disease alert map, and claims to be able to identify 95% of all disease outbreaks, some of them before WHO or CDC."

Great!

[Apple Acolyte]

Now all the hypochondriac hyper-nerds have another reason to sit home on their computers, cloistered from the outside world. :-)

Re:I still think

[dynchaw]

Today
Jenny Smith gave you the clap! Give her measles? 3:56pm

Missing important diseases...

[commlinx]

I was looking forward to viewing the "erectile dysfunction" map based on viagra posts.

Re:I still think

[Anonymous Coward]

Better still, look at what symptoms people are searching for. Sure, you'll get a little noise every time a repeat of "House" is aired. However, when google gets systemic swaths of "butt bleeding" , "grey vomit" and "ocular hemorrhoids", bad things might be coming.