In New Tools to Combat Epidemics, the Key Is Context

by Amy O’Leary,  New York Times

Not long ago, Google Flu seemed like magic — a smart, cheap way to sift digital data for the public good.

But Google Flu, which tries to track flu outbreaks faster than the government, has shown its limitations. Not only did it grossly overestimate the flu this year, but its methods did little to track new, deadly diseases that could emerge anywhere, in places as random as a mass religious gathering on the banks of the Ganges or a poultry market in Shanghai.

Now a new project called BioMosaic is building a more comprehensive picture of foreign-borne disease threats in the United States, by merging three separate data tools into a single app for guiding decisions at the time of an outbreak.

BioMosaic merges airline records, disease reports, and demographic data so that public health officials can gain a picture of health risks through a website and an iPad app, and then dispatches preventive measures to individual cities, counties, or hospitals to help stop a larger outbreak.

“It really helps you get right to the heart of the matter: That concept that a global event in Haiti becomes a local event in five counties in Florida and five counties in New York,” says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Marty Cetron.

Similar tools in this vein include the HealthMap mapping tool, which monitors on-the-ground disease reports, and BioDiaspora, a project designed to track human movements around the world by amassing an immense database.

Harvard Medical School professor John Brownstein says the ultimate goal for this type of technology is the ability to predict epidemics before they start, but BioDiaspora creator Kamran Khan notes that politics, distressed resources, nationalism, fear, and other forces can thwart even the best data tools. …..   Article

DCL: Pandemic watch systems is an area that will depend upon a lot of event processing technology.  To “predict epidemics” – if you really mean “predict” – one has to have global, real time event processing of lots and lots of event feeds, many more than the three mentioned, and many of dubious quality.  The NYT article does nothing to credit the 20 years of pioneering work in the field by the Canadian government (discovered SARS), or the current activities of the WHO, the UN and, yes,  Google.  See the chapter on Holistic Event Processing in my book.