It's just a passing fad, this Internet thingie ...

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

From: Randall Webmail <rvh40 () insightbb com>
Date: March 20, 2008 8:43:55 PM PDT
To: dave () farber net, dewayne () warpspeed com
Cc: johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com
Subject: It's just a passing fad,  this Internet thingie ...

From
USINFOlistmgr () STATE GOV
Date
Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:05:04 -0400
Subject
Internet Latest Tool in Emerging Infectious Disease Surveillance

Internet Latest Tool in Emerging Infectious Disease Surveillance

(Google foundation moves into business of digital, genetic detection)  
(854)

By Cheryl Pellerin
Staff Writer

Atlanta -- In an era of pandemics like HIV/AIDS and emerging diseases  
like
highly pathogenic avian influenza and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis,
disease surveillance is critical to early detection and response.

Until the early 1990s, such surveillance -- systematic data collection  
and
analysis -- consisted largely of manual recordkeeping and official
reporting of disease outbreaks to the World Health Organization (WHO) by
member-state ministries of health.

Today, a growing number of informal Internet-based organizations  
contribute
to emerging infectious disease surveillance by receiving information  
from
subscribers or collecting it online from electronic media, discussion
groups and other Web sites 24 hours a day, and sending alerts out by
e-mail.

According to a statement on the WHO Web site, more than 60 percent of  
its
initial outbreak reports now come from unofficial, informal sources.

Even Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the company behind the world's
most popular search engine, has launched a Predict and Prevent  
Initiative,
led by epidemiologist Dr. Larry Brilliant, to "use information and
technology," a Google press release said, "to empower communities to
predict and prevent emerging threats before they become local,  
regional or
global crises."

DIGITAL DETECTION

The Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED)-mail, part of the
International Society for Infectious Diseases, began as an experimental
system in 1993 and is the oldest of the global electronic reporting  
systems
for emerging infectious diseases and toxins.

Subscription is free and open to all sources; ProMED is approaching  
45,000
subscribers worldwide and reports in seven languages. All reports are
screened by a panel of expert moderators before the reports are posted.

Writing in Global Infectious Disease Surveillance and Detection:  
Assessing
the Challenges, Finding Solutions, a 2007 workshop summary, Dr. Stephen
Morse of Columbia University said ProMED was among the first to report  
the
1995 Ebola outbreak in Kikwit, Democratic Republic of the Congo; the  
1999
West Nile virus outbreak in New York State; and the 2003 severe acute
respiratory syndrome outbreak in China.

"What lessons have we learned?" asked ProMED's Dr. Marjorie Pollack  
during
a presentation at the 2008 International Conference on Emerging  
Infectious
Diseases (ICEID), held March 16-19 in Atlanta. "We live in a global
village. No single institution has the complete capacity to address all
needs and cover all bases with respect to disease surveillance."

ProMED, Morse said, has encouraged the development of more digital
detection networks, including Canada's Global Public Health Information
Network and WHO's Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (See  
"Updated
Rules Offer New Framework for Health Security (
http://www.america.gov/st/health-english/2008/March/20080318183104abretnuh0.8928491.html
).")

Other networks include the European Commission's Medical Intelligence
System (MedISys), a real-time news alert system on medical topics that
reviews more than 20,000 articles daily from 800 Web sources and
categorizes articles in 25 languages; and HealthMap, a free automated
network that gathers information on infectious outbreaks from news  
wires,
RSS feeds, ProMED mailing lists and WHO alerts. The network then  
organizes
and displays the information in real time as graphic maps.

HealthMap, a product of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and
Technology, was created by Clark Freifeld, a research software  
developer at
the Children's Hospital Informatics Program, and John Brownstein, an
assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

Project Argus is a U.S. government global biological event-detection and
tracking system that provides early warning alerts, according to Dr.  
James
Wilson in Advances in Disease Surveillance 2007. Multilingual analysts
cover global sources in 34 languages. Argus manages up to 3,300  
biological
event case files and, during the 2007 flu season, issued nearly 3,000  
event
reports across 128 countries and in 27 languages.

EARLY WARNING

The Google.org Predict and Prevent Initiative will focus on emerging
infectious diseases, which are on the rise because of climate change,
urbanization, growing international travel and trade and closer contact
between people and animals.

Most of the world's emerging diseases are zoonoses -- animal diseases  
that
spread to people (See "Emerging Infectious Diseases Focus of  
International
Meeting (
http://www.america.gov/st/health-english/2008/March/20080314142654lcnirellep0.7607691.html
).")

The effort supports two related pathways from prediction to prevention,
Brilliant said during a presentation at ICEID 2008. The first is
vulnerability mapping -- establishing which populations have minimal  
or no
access to health care and may live with and depend on animals for their
livelihood -- and identifying "hot spots" where diseases are most  
likely to
arise.

The second path involves creating systems for better detection of  
threats
by using innovative methods to find threats quickly wherever they occur,
confirming outbreaks and identifying their cause, and alerting key  
involved
parties, from villagers to global health authorities.

"Technology and access to multiple sources of information has brought us
closer to this possibility," Brilliant added, "and that is what  
Google.org
wants to help support. We want to join the researchers and public health
heroes here in this room and throughout the world to push the  
boundaries of
what is knowable about where, what, how and when the next pandemic, the
next emerging communicable disease, will arise."

More information about ProMED (
http://www.promedmail.org/pls/otn/f?p=2400:1000: ) and HealthMap (
http://www.healthmap.org/en ) is available on the organizations' Web  
sites.

(USINFO is a product of the Bureau of International Information  
Programs,
U.S. Department of State.  Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)


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