Health Map: A Project website to track health alerts

By the time a major disease outbreak is reported and the news would have reached the Internet and by the time it reaches the general public it would have already affected a sizable portion of the population under its influence. Thanks to the information explosion these days, it is simply hard to find what's actually and very important like matters on health. Now in the days of financial crisis we get to see bail-outs, wall-street, recession, debts, mortgage in most of the headlines in the world today.

To overcome this problem researchers have been working on a project since 2006 on a project website called HealthMap, which extracts all the buried information from the web places like Google News, World Health Organization and all the other online discussion groups. The extracted data is then reprocessed and presented to the researchers and the public in a way to track an outbreak of a disease or virus or any other relevant info region by region.
The site also has other features like color coding to distinguish between the severity of an outbreak and other parameters including prevalent weather. This was disclosed by the researchers in the latest edition of PLoS (Public Library of Science) journals on preventive health studies.

The site is sponsored by the Google's Prevent and Predict initiative and could be of much use in the developing world, where the researchers mostly predict most of the outbreaks to the prevalent climatic conditions and other geography related factors.


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