I never focused too long on the myriad of ways that the
Internet has changed our lives, until recently. This past February, The Atlantic published excerpts
of Polish pundit Piotr Czerski’s “manifesto” titled, “We, the Web Kids.” The essay put my
relationship to the Internet into a new light- particularly when compared to
how my parents, for example, interact with the Web. “The Internet to us is not
something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly
present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the
Internet, we live on the Internet and along it,” writes Czerski. The Web kids rely
on this shared memory drive; we extract information, contribute to it, and
re-post it at our leisure. We learn about new scientific research at home and
participate virtually in uprisings across the ocean. Geographic barriers
dissolve. And we expect to do this all instantaneously; we want it “here and
now, without waiting for the file to download.”
This essay also put my first post-graduate school job into a
new light. Admittedly, I am not very tech savvy; I’ve always thought of myself
more as a qualitative, literature-oriented person. But my international
experience, French language skills, and recently acquired MPH landed me at
HealthMap, a research group, co-founded by a software developer and an
epidemiologist, that uses online media to track infectious diseases worldwide.
And it does this in real time, in an almost completely automated manner.
The healthmap homepage |
HealthMap was founded in 2006 by John Brownstein, PhD and
Clark Freifeld, MS. Back then, Brownstein and Freifeld understood that there
was a large gap between the beginning of an infectious disease outbreak and the
public becoming aware of and responding to that outbreak. They attributed this
lag to traditional public health reporting, which is often troubled by
structural hierarchies and geographic and political barriers. For example, a
typical public health worker in a small, remote village may take note of a
strange syndrome that is surfacing in a handful of young kids. He or she might
provide that information to medical professionals who will want to take samples
for analysis. Well, the samples will need to be sent to laboratories miles away
and it’s rainy season so the roads are washed out. Let’s say the samples did
get to the lab. Once an infectious disease agent is confirmed, the report will
then move on to district, national and then international officials. This whole
process could take weeks. And during those weeks, infectious diseases can
spread.
Brownstein and Freifeld recognized that there was a wealth
of information available through the Internet that would fundamentally change
the picture of global health. So, they created a freely available online
platform that gave people access to this information.
Essentially, the system mines the Web for formal and
informal sources of infectious disease news. Data is collected by carefully
developed language specific search strings (HealthMap has news feeds in over a
dozen languages) that sift through various news aggregators (Google News,
Baidu, allAfrica), RSS feeds, mailing lists and chat rooms. The collected data
is then automatically assigned a pathogen and location of the outbreak, based
on information in the article (or chat room, mailing list, etc.). Then, the
system determines the relevancy of each alert and filters it into one of six
categories: Breaking, Context, Warning, Old News, Non-Disease Related, or
International Significance. Any duplicate data is clustered together. The end
product, http://healthmap.org, is a highly
organized data set that allows public health officials, international
travelers, government agencies and interested community members to access a
real-time view of infectious disease outbreaks around the globe.
The HealthMap platform has been used to track public health
threats in many contexts. Every year before the Hajj, we begin heightened disease
surveillance on the countries that send the most pilgrims, and post all
infectious disease news from these countries to a map created especially for Hajj. Similarly, we mine formal and
informal sources for information regarding the wildlife trade because of its
role in spreading zoonotic diseases.
The Internet has radically changed our way of life. It is no
longer a tool that we use to perform a specific task or a tool that requires
special training to use; it is an interactive system where people can deposit
and build upon collected intelligence- an idea that Czerski hints at and with
which Mike Kuniavsky, an entrepeneur who studies people’s relationships to
digital technology, agrees. In 2008, Kuniavsky
explained that all real world objects have “information shadows,” or
digital representations, that exist on the Internet. These information shadows
can be built upon and interacted with by other users. As a result, the Internet
grows exponentially.
Arguably, HealthMap takes information shadows of disease
outbreaks (local news reports, tweets, chat room questions, status updates,
etc.) and augments official public health reports with real time information.
But what makes HealthMap truly unique, is that it takes the informal information,
or information shadows, and automatically makes it immediately useful to those
who can act upon it.
Czerski differentiated our generation from others by
pointing out that we are the first generation that exists not on paper, but on
and through the Web. HealthMap is exemplary of the Web kid generation, as it
has transported information disease tracking to the Web, and made it an
immediate and global process. Not only is outbreak information available online
and in real time, but it is also freely
available. Czerski finishes the manifesto with: “What we value the most is
freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of access to information and to culture. We
feel that it is thanks to freedom that the Web is what it is.” As a freely
available site, HealthMap provides international users with knowledge to make informed
health-related decisions. A true product of the Web kids, HealthMap has
leveraged the power of the Web, and our existence on it, to improve disease
surveillance and timely responses.
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