According to a Discovery Channel news release,
Every hour, HealthMap, an infectious disease-tracking Web site, culls through news Web sites, public health list servs, the World Health Organization's online pages, and other Web sites in six different languages to pinpoint outbreaks of disease that real-world doctors can then act on.
HealthMap gathers information from the Internet and filters it, removing, for example, duplicated or irrelevant information. It can pinpoint an incident of bubonic plague in Siberia, for example, while ensuring that a "plague" of home foreclosures in northern California doesn't show up on the free access Google Maps.
So far the program identifies about 95 percent of all disease outbreaks, sometimes days before the World Health Organization or the Centers of Disease Control announce them.
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