The Domestic and International Impacts of the 2009-H1N1 Influenza A Pandemic Global Challenges, Global Solutions: Workshop Summary (2010) / Chapter Skim
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A9 Rumors of Pandemic: Monitoring Emerging Disease Outbreaks on the Internet
A9 Rumors of Pandemic: Monitoring Emerging Disease Outbreaks on the Internet
Pages 269-282
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From page 269... ...
Introduction The work of ProMED-mail (the International Society for Infectious Diseases Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases) and that of the Institute of Medicine (IOM)
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From page 270... ...
Many clinicians and scientists soon had access to electronic mail and some began to wonder whether this medium could be used as a way of speeding the transmission of information about emerging diseases. A group of very prescient individuals, Steve Morse, Jack Woodall, and Barbara Hatch-Rosenberg, met at a UN-sponsored conference on detection of the use of biological weapons and began an email list among the attendees at the meeting.
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From page 271... ...
. Laboratories, practitioners, and members of the general public report to local officials, who then report to regional officials, and they to national officials.
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The idea of web crawling, or using automated search systems to mine the Internet for early warnings of emerging diseases, was born. One of the first systems in the public health domain was the Global Public Health Information Network (GPHIN)
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From page 273... ...
They use multiple sources, including ProMED reports, WHO reports, a variety of news media sources, and other freely available sources. HealthMap places these reports in a geographical context and makes them available to everyone at no cost.
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From page 274... ...
HealthMap could generate alerts for ProMED staff so that, for example, a ProMED virology moderator could receive reports up to several times a day on a particular set of viral disease search terms. This would clearly help in the discovery of new content and, we hoped, improve the timeliness of reporting because it would not depend on a reader seeing a report and sending it to ProMED, or on a ProMED rapporteur or staff member finding the report and posting it.
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From page 275... ...
was actually detectable by other methods. Figure A9-4 is a screen shot of Google Flu Trends that shows the slow rise in ILI activity at this time of year.
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From page 276... ...
Other blog entries discuss the role of the traditional public health system, its detection of the swine flu outbreak through laboratory findings, and its response to it. But at the same time informal sources were used, including HealthMap and Veratect, for recording information on this outbreak early on.
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From page 277... ...
6 April: Veratect, a Kirkland, Washington-based company that scours news reports for emerging threats, reports in its subscription-only database that local Mexican health officials have declared an alert because of respiratory disease outbreak in La Gloria, Veracruz state, Mexico. 11 April: As per the International Health Regulations (IHR)
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From page 278... ...
One of the activities that ProMED has pursued in collaboration with HealthMap is to take the archive of ProMED data, which consists of more than 40,000 free text reports dating back to 1994, and put them into a structured database. This was done by extracting, in a mostly automated way, the information from reports based on disease occurrence, type of disease, location, numbers of cases, dates of onset, dates of detection, dates of lab confirmation, and so forth, and putting them into a structured database and combining these data with external informal sources (such as news media)
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From page 279... ...
ProMED and HealthMap have studied the structured global baseline of its reports, news reports, and other reports by comparing the dates of detection of a series of outbreaks and establishing a group of distinct outbreaks based on geographic region and time period. We first assessed the sensitivity and scope of these datasets with a descriptive analysis of ProMED reports.
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The line represents the date of the EPR report and each blue dot represents the date of something else, a date identifiable within a ProMED report. For the earliest ProMED report, the dates of symptom onset, hospitalization, death, or lab confirmation are recorded and the black diamonds represent the median time before the publication, or the official verification of the report.
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From page 281... ...
R01627 uneditable bitmapped image Conclusions The monitoring of informal sources of information or rumors is an important tool in public health. It is free of political constraints, it is transparent, and it allows for clinicians and other observers to have a role in reporting on emerging diseases.
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From page 282... ...
J McGreer, National Microbiology Laboratory Canada, Canadian Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Study Team.
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