Resource of the Week: HEALTHmap
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

While fishing for reports to put on DocuTicker every day, I look at a heck of a lot of press releases. Every once in awhile, I find something with an extremely high cool quotient that I can’t wait to share with as many people as possible. Just this week, I stumbled across…

HEALTHmap
Says the press release:

Need to know where avian flu, salmonella or dengue fever been popping up? A quick view of HEALTHmap shows you where more than 50 diseases have been reported around the world, who is reporting and how “hot” an outbreak is based on the number of reports. Drill down by content and city or narrow by disease and read what has been reported in the last 30 days.

This thing is so easy to use that even someone like me, who is often visually overwhelmed by “mashups” involving Google Maps, can figure it out almost immediately. It can be manipulated like any old regular Google Map — e.g., click and drag, zoom in and out via the slider, etc. — and you can choose the map (default), satellite or hybrid view. To get to a particular part of the world quickly, use one of the links at the top of the map to zoom in by content/region. In the top righthand corner is a link that switches to a full-screen view.

Over on the lefthand side of the page are four separate menus that provide endless options for customization, in terms of the information presented on the map. According to the news release:

HEALTHmap provides a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health by combing disparate data sources, 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.

The top two menus let you use checkboxes to select or deselect news feeds and different diseases. The third menu provides links that allow you to display alerts by country. The menu at the bottom offers links to the full text of the most recent alerts, displayed in a separate, smaller window.

If you look below the map, you’ll see a slider that lets you display alerts by date range. You’ll also see a colored bar labeled “Heat Index,” that shades incrementally from yellow to red. You’ll note that the markers on the map have different colors within this spectrum. According to information about this resource:

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.

This is not a brand-new resource; it was launched in September 2006 by the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program (Boston) and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology. The brains behind it belong to Clark Freifeld, a Research Software Developer at the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program; and John Brownstein, PhD, Instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, Affiliated Faculty at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, with joint appointments to Children’s Hospital Boston Informatics Program and its Division of Emergency Medicine.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 and is filed under Resource of the Week, Science, Source File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.