HealthMap

The students around me are absorbed in studying for the bar exam, so it's a good time to prowl the Web for cool sites making news. If you haven't seen HealthMap yet, take a look when you have a chance. HealthMap tracks the latest infectious disease outbreaks throughout the world by gathering and filtering masses of information from news and other web sites, including health organization and government sources. Using Google Maps, it creates a real-time graphical presentation that helps predict and monitor infectious diseases, from the flu to salmonella and plague, sometimes before official agencies have announced a problem. Displaying information by disease, by geographic region, and by level of urgency, with news feeds and alerts, HealthMap is fascinating to explore. For more about HealthMap, I recommend an article in Discovery Channel's Discovery News (Eric Bland, "Web-Crawling Program ID's Disease Outbreaks," July 18, 2008).



Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat