Word: outbreaks
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...pictures of the swine-flu outbreak in Mexico...
...Science study also provided the first estimate of the person-to-person transmissibility of H1N1. The researchers calculate that every person infected by the virus will go on to infect 1.3 to 1.7 other people on average. (That number will probably be higher for schoolchildren - in one outbreak at a private school in New York City in the spring, each sick student infected 2.4 classmates.) As flus go, that makes H1N1 more transmissible than most - on par with the moderate 1957 Asian flu pandemic - which makes it particularly important to get a large chunk of the population vaccinated early...
...Outbreaks app also allows users to do their own surveillance and reporting - you can send messages and images to HealthMap about disease flare-ups in your area. The idea is to further broaden the net of health information beyond official sources. Think how useful a few iPhone-armed people in Mexico might have been during the initial waves of the H1N1 outbreak last spring - or how they might affect the upcoming flu season in the U.S. this autumn. "We're not sure what kind of response we'll see, but the idea is to develop a two-way flow...
Certainly, opening HealthMap to user-based reports could introduce an element of chaos, and even outright panic, into disease surveillance - ordinary people aren't trained epidemiologists. Global health officials already struggle to separate the noise from the truth; for every actual outbreak of a new disease, there are countless false or overstated reports. But in an interconnected age, when both information and disease can spread in an instant, having an imperfect network is better than none at all. "This is an alert tool that is not trying to raise fear but awareness instead," says Brownstein. "We want to encourage good...
Developed by researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston and the MIT Media Lab, the application combines the GPS system of the iPhone with outbreak tracking information from HealthMap.org, a web prowling system that mines official and unofficial Internet data sources for information on outbreaks of emerging, infectious diseases...