HealthMap- Global Disease Alert Map

Just came across this interesting new program on the web:

http://www.healthmap.org/en

which looks like it combs web text to collect news about global diseases, in real-time. I wonder if something like this program, which will amass far more data than anyone can ever sift through, will make a difference, or if the alerts we want to know about, like one or two cases with symptoms of an epidemic, will get lost like so many needles in a haystack?

The site links to this article published in April in the Journal of Life Sciences about who actually uses HealthMap. The leading anecdote about the first reports of SARS is not to be missed:

http://www.tjols.com/article-611.html

I looked at the website, and it does seem to provide an overwhelming amount of information at first glance. However, I found that you can "unselect" all diseases, and then only select the one or two you are interested in, e.g. tuberculosis, Ebola, etc. In this way, you are only looking at epidemics of the specific disease(s) of interest, decreasing the size of the "haystack" to more accurately locate the "needle," as it were.

Another useful feature of this site is that, rather than clicking a specific disease, you can also click "undiagnosed" or "not yet classified," and which then locates epidemics of undiagnosed diseases and links for more info. This seems like it could be useful in identifying epidemics of emerging, novel, or difficult-to-diagnose diseases.