Sunday, January 9, 2011

HealthMap: Global Health Local Information

This post is about an online website resource I wanted to share with everyone:

http://healthmap.org/en/index.php?PHPSESSID=8f158mnu46etlmbsg4pnc9od73

This is a world map generated online by a website that tracks outbreaks of disease throughout the world. Once they hear about an outbreak, they make a post indicating the date, a summary of what occurred, the disease, the location, how many cases, and how many deaths, and a link to the source where they obtained the information.  It is a cool resource because things are reported almost instantly (they update them every hour and there are around 80 posts for January 9th alone).  It also allows you to sort them by any category, so if you are interested in just influenza, for example, you can literally click and see where all the influenza outbreaks in the past week have been.  Also, it is good to note that the website is NOT virus specific and includes other types of diseases. However, there are a lot of viruses in there.

It is also cool because you can geographically visualize where the outbreaks are happening because there is a map with pinpoints that show all the different locations.  Here is a screen shot of what the interactive map component looks like if you are curious:



Hope you enjoy the site and it helps you out.

http://healthmap.org/en/index.php?PHPSESSID=8f158mnu46etlmbsg4pnc9od73

Lauren Platt

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