http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/16.page JForum - http://www.jforum.net
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:

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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.]]> http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/99/291.page http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/preList/99/291.page GMT