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When the next salmonella or avian flu outbreak hits, the internet will have the news first. But good luck finding that news amid the chatter about Angelina Jolie, Tom Cruise or the newly touted benefits of watermelon. A new website, HealthMap, addresses that challenge by siphoning up text from Google News, the World Health Organization and online discussion groups, then filtering it and boiling it down into mapped data that researchers -- and the public -- can use to track new disease outbreaks, region by region. "There is so much information on the web about disease outbreaks but it's obscured by garbage and noise," said John Brownstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and co-founder of HealthMap.org. "The idea of HealthMap is to get filtered, valuable information to the public and public health community in one... [read full story]
