Depends on good human doctors (Score 1)

While it is nice to tout a system that "picks up" disease outbreaks "some of them before WHO or CDC", it is important to remember that:

- this system does not DETECT outbreaks (nor does it claim to): it presents a map of already reported outbreaks

- no disease outbreak EVER ever been initially detected by an automated system before an alert doctor or other healthcare provider: a human has ALWAYS been the "sensor" that detects disease outbreaks on the ground.

- the WHO and the CDC are not SUPPOSED to identify every disease outbreak in the world, just like a building maintenance staff isn't supposed to identify every coffee spill in the building: most coffee spills can be handled locally, and the maintenance staff never needs to be notified at all. Likewise with disease outbreaks.

It is very interesting, and sometimes useful in generating hypotheses, to view a map of news coverage of outbreaks, but a system like this can never, ever take the place of alert clinicians who, with brain computing power that dwarfs the fastest processor Google can field, are able to spot trends and unusual cases better than any computerized system.

Better to also spend money improving the education and capabilities of those clinicians, and improving the systems by which they can notify a larger world about their unusual cases -- maybe those notifications could feed into a system like the one described and finally give it the ability to truly detect outbreaks.

Joel Selanikio, MD
DataDyne.org
Washington, DC