About HealthMap

HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HealthMap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers.

HealthMap Visualization

Heat Index: Low High

• Marker color represents a composite score based on the recency of alerts, the number of disease outbreaks, and the number of sources providing information at a particular location. Our algorithm applies an exponential weighting, yielding increased heat (redness) for more recent outbreak news.
• The source of the alert is represented by an icon next to the alert headline.
• The square-shaped marker icon indicates a country-level marker, while state, province and local markers are round . We currently have administrative divisions and some major cities for USA, UK, Canada, China, India, Australia, Mexico and Russia, with more coming soon.

Sources

HealthMap is possible thanks to freely available information from the following sources. Use of their logos or trademarks by HealthMap is intended only to refer specifically to the respective service; it does not imply any endorsement or affiliation.

• ProMED Mail: Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases, a program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases.
• World Health Organization: The United Nations specialized agency for health.
• EuroSurveillance: Peer-reviewed European information on communicable disease surveillance and control. Published by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
• Google News: A commercial news aggregation service provided by Google.
• Moreover: A commercial news feed aggregation service provided by VeriSign.

Software Tools

HealthMap is a Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP application and relies on the following open products. Special thanks to their authors.

• Google Maps
• GoogleMapAPI for PHP
• xajax PHP AJAX library
• Open Source Web Design (Blue Sky template by Jonas John)

HealthMap also uses Fisher-Robinson Bayesian filtering, as described by Gary Robinson in A Statistical Approach to the Spam Problem.


www.healthmap.org