About HealthMap
HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HealthMap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers.
HealthMap Visualization
- Heat Index: Low
High
Marker color represents a composite score based on the recency of alerts, the number of disease outbreaks,
and the number of sources providing information at a particular location. Our algorithm applies an exponential weighting,
yielding increased heat (redness) for more recent outbreak news.
- The source of the alert is represented by an icon next to the alert headline.
- The square-shaped marker icon
indicates a country-level marker, while state, province and local markers are round 
. We currently have administrative divisions and some major cities for USA, UK, Canada, China, India, Australia, Mexico and Russia, with more coming soon.
Sources
HealthMap is possible thanks to freely available information from the following sources.
Use of their logos or trademarks by HealthMap is intended only to refer specifically to the respective service; it does not imply any endorsement or affiliation.
Software Tools
HealthMap is a Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP application and relies on
the following open products. Special thanks
to their authors.
HealthMap also uses Fisher-Robinson Bayesian filtering, as described by Gary Robinson in A Statistical Approach to the Spam Problem.
Press, Publications & Presentations
HealthMap In the News
HealthMap Publications
- Brownstein JS, Freifeld CC, Reis BY, Mandl KD (2008) Surveillance Sans Frontières: Internet-Based Emerging Infectious Disease Intelligence and the HealthMap Project. PLoS Med 5(7): e151
- Freifeld CC, Mandl KD, Reis BY, Brownstein JS (2007) HealthMap: Global infectious disease monitoring through automated classification and visualization of Internet media reports. J Am Med Inform Assoc.
- Brownstein JS, Freifeld CC (2007) HealthMap: the development of automated real-time internet surveillance for epidemic intelligence. Euro Surveill 12: E071129 071125.
- Brownstein JS, Freifeld CC, Reis BY, Mandl KD (2007) HealthMap: Internet-based emerging infectious disease intelligence. In: Institute of Medicine, editor. Infectious Disease Surveillance and Detection: Assessing the Challenges - Finding Solutions. Washington, DC. pp. 183-204.
HealthMap Presentations
HealthMap Team
HealthMap was created by Clark Freifeld and John Brownstein. If you find it useful or interesting, we would love to hear from you. Please email us with your comments, questions and suggestions: info AT healthmap.org
- Clark Freifeld
is a Research Software Developer at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program and a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab.
He studied Computer Science and Mathematics at Yale University, and has over
seven years of experience developing feature-rich Web applications.
His interests include Web-based user-interface design,
data visualization, text mining, and technologies for developing countries.
-
John Brownstein, PhD
is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and has joint appointments in the
Children's Hospital Boston Informatics Program and Division of Emergency Medicine. He was trained as
an epidemiologist in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale University where he
received his PhD. Dr. Brownstein works on novel statistical modeling and medical informatics approaches
for accelerating the translation of public health surveillance research into practice.
- Mikaela Keller, PhD
is a computer scientist specialized in statistical machine learning. She has worked particularly
in developing approaches to enrich text representations by incorporating knowledge gained across
large unlabeled textual data sets. Before joining CHIP as a Research Fellow, she was a PhD candidate
at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, as well as a Research Assistant at IDIAP Research Institute.
- Susan Aman is a Software Developer at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program. She has over 10 years of experience in the internet industry, including system administration and web development work at Firefly Inc., iCast Corporation (a CMGi company) and most recently at Northeastern University.
- Amy Sonricker, MPH is a Research Coordinator for the HealthMap Project with a background as an epidemiologist specializing in vector-borne and zoonotic diseases. Her interests include increasing disease surveillance efforts for emerging infectious diseases in resource-poor areas, syndromic surveillance, and combining domestic animal and wildlife disease data with human disease data.
HealthMap Advisors
- Kenneth Mandl, MD, MPH
is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, Director of
the Intelligent Health Lab at CHIP and co-director of the
PHIConnect CDC Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics.
- Ben Reis, MEng, PhD
is a member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School and at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology. Dr. Reis holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where he attended as a Marshall Scholar. He completed his postgraduate training at Harvard Medical School, where he held an NIH Fellowship in Health Informatics.
- Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, Director of Children's Hospital Informatics Program and Harvard Medical School's Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics program.
Moreover: A commercial news feed aggregation service provided by VeriSign.Wildlife Disease Information Node: A news feed from the Global Wildlife Disease News Map provided by the NBII-Wildlife Disease Information Node at the US Geological Survey.
