In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

If you want to monitor what infectious diseases might be in your area or just check out a cool preparedness 2.0/public health application, take a look at www.healthmap.org.

Created by a research software developer Clark Freifield and a professor of pediatrics John Brownstein from Boston’s Children’s Hospital, HealthMap ”brings together disparate data sources to achieve unified and comprehensive view of current global state of infectious disease and the effect on human health.” 

You can search the map in a number of ways, including by country and infectious disease. The map is fascinating for a number of reasons. Just browsing through it offers a vivid reminder of how fertile our world is for infectious diseases. Then, you can find out the situation in your home area (ie. when I clicked on New York state on the map, I found out that West Nile Virus has just been discovered for the first time this year in Long Island). Healthmap is also a helpful reference if you are travelling somewhere in the world and want to see what, if anything, is going on there.

And, it is yet another example of how preparedness 2.0 applications can repackage, present and distribute emergency information to the public in new and accessible ways. Hat tip to John Bowen at the Hometown Security blog where I originally found HealthMap.