Tuesday, May 08, 2012
Google Maps Catching Diseases
The BioCaster Global Health Monitor is a Google Map showing outbreaks of known and emerging infectious diseases around the world. The map works by text mining over 1,400 RSS news feeds for information about emerging diseases.
You can search for news about individual diseases. It is also possible to search the map by date. You can choose to view headlines for the present day or the previous thirty days. You can also look at any specific weekly period over the last four weeks. The timeline control below the map allows you to view an animation of the past thirty days on the map.
HealthMap is another Google Maps based application that plots real-time infectious disease outbreaks from around the world.
The map gathers data from disparate sources, including online news aggregators, eyewitness reports, expert-curated discussions and validated official reports.