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On March 14, 2014, HealthMap—an online database created by researchers at Boston’s Children’s Hospital in 2006 to collect accounts of disease cases from various online sources—notified scientists of an article written in French about cases of a “strange fever” in Macenta, Guinea. Nine days later, the World Health Organization officially announced an Ebola outbreak in the area.
Although the outbreak was first identified by the HealthMap software when a news article was published online, other types of sources have proven invaluable for researchers to continue tracking the virus—most recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo. One key source is Twitter, Emily Cohn, who works on HealthMap at Boston Children’s Hospital, tells The Scientist in an email. Tweets containing the term “Ebola” or evidence of specific symptoms such as fever, joint or muscle aches, and coughing or vomiting blood are flagged by a machine learning algorithm and ...
