Group items tagged

cases are surging in a number of countries -- not just the three other endemic countries of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria, but in a dozen reinfected countries, many in Africa.

Many countries have been declared polio-free only to be reinfected by virus imported from another country

in the first 100 days of the outbreak tracked closely

data reported from hospital and clinics

social media data were available almost instantly

others have shown that Twitter and other online sources can provide meaningful information about outbreaks of diseases such as H1N1 and swine flu

new work establishes that the approach is useful for tracking a disease that emerges in the unsafe living conditions that often follow a disaster, says Polgreen.

188,819 tweets that contained or were tagged with the word cholera during the first 100 days of the cholera outbreak

analysis suggests the social tool provides a good measure of the disease’s spread

The researchers compared the tweets to data from HealthMap, a disease-tracking tool that mines Internet news stories, blogs and discussion groups and lets the public report illness by cell phone. Both the Twitter and HealthMap data corresponded to official data from the Haitian Ministry of Public Health.

Official sources of data are better validated, but on the downside they are going to take time