Where in the world is ....?

“The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything”

-Albert Einstein quotes

Each year the TED conference hands out TED prizes to individuals with an idea that can change the world. One winner talked about tracking disease epidemics world-wide with data from Google and other sources. Now it appears that that dream is alive and well.

Check out HealthMap at http://healthmap.org/en/. 

"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)."

The home page is a bit overwhelming with all outbreaks from the past three days. Hover the mouse over any pin to see the name of the disease.

I find the display more interesting when a single disease is searched. The default is the past 3-days but you can change this up to one month with the Advanced search options. I selected Typhoid in the past month and found cases in Algeria, China and Kyrgyzstan.

Bottom Line

This is a great resource for keeping an eye on swine flu or any other illness that you are concerned about.