Low Cost Technology Saving Lives Globally
A little known group in Canada (GPHIN) which started in the late 1990's uses web crawlers to look for signs of crises around the globe and report it to the WHO as an early warning system.
With a very small budget of $800,000/yr the small group was making 75% of the early warning reports to the WHO in the early years.. (government bureaucracy, secrecy, etc are attributed to why government reports lag)... Now the system is reporting about 40% of world events. (Putting the Surveillance Cost in perspective ( $0.45/hr/country) or {$0.01/hr/million people on Earth}
In Nov 2002 it picked up on a cluster of children with high fevers in China, a flu outbreak. The SARS epidemic was kept secret by Chinese authorities until it was impossible to suppress. (The key to suppressing any epidemic is early warning and quick execution to stop the pathogens.)
(GPHIN) Global Public Health Intelligence Network is one of the most powerful new tools for gathering epidemic intelligence. A customized search engine that continuously scans the world wide web for rumors and reports of suspicious disease events. Health Canada developed the Internet application used by WHO since 1997. GPHIN operates as a sensitive real-time early warning system by systematically searching for keywords in over 950 news feeds and electronic discussion groups around the world.
The heart of GPHIN is "Text Analytics" which extracts computable data from large amounts of unstructured or semi-structured text, transforming and visualizing that data into information and knowledge, and detecting or corroborating connections, events, and trends. On a daily basis, it picks up 18,000 items, of which, 200 merit further review by WHO analysts.
What other low-cost technologies are being used to save lives around the world?
(SARS)
Severe acute respiratory syndrome is a viral respiratory disease of zoonotic origin caused by the SARS coronavirus. Between November 2002 and July 2003, an outbreak of SARS in southern China caused an eventual 8,098 cases, resulting in 774 deaths reported in 37 countries
The SARS epidemic in 2003 cost the world economy $30 Billion in just 4 months.
Other Articles to Read
The FLU, Keeping your family safe.
SUPERBUGS Keeping Your Family Safe
Computer Model Forecast Hurricanes