Ok so you might be a bit sick of hearing about Swine Flu but for those of you who might be worried about whether there are any outbreaks nearby here’s an app for you, but only if you have an Apple iPhone.
“Outbreaks Near Me” allows iPhone users to keep up to date with various outbreaks anywhere in the world and if the inclination takes you, you can even warn other users of outbreaks near them too.
How does it work? It gets its information from HealthMap, which is a global disease alert website developed by Dr John Brownstein of the Children’s Hospital in Boston along with Clark Friefeld of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This site is constantly searching out information from the US Centres for Disease Control as well as from news stories around the web, Twitter Tweets and even blogs.
The application doesn’t just warn about Swine Flu either, any potentially worrying disease is mapped.
Apparently at the moment it is putting out a couple of warnings in the UK. One alert is about an E Coli outbreak at a nursery in Plymouth and another is about a few cases of measles in Sussex.
“This is a new way to disseminate information to a device that everyone has on them all the time” says Dr Brownstein.
“This is about education, getting people to understand the epidemiology of infectious disease. We want to encourage basic prevention practices, like good day-to-day hygiene and vaccinations.”
Ok so you can get an early warning about various outbreaks but can’t help wondering if it’s maybe better not to know as some folk might just panic.
“We think that having more information and being more informed is better than…when you don’t know what is happening.
“We want people to use their own good judgment to interpret the information to make a decision about whether they should travel to a particular place” say the developers.
Hanna Gould at the Centers for Disease Control welcomes the new app. “I think that in general HealthMap and this new iPhone app make public health surveillance data more user-friendly.
“What’s nice is that this new app integrates all the information from all these sources and so you can visualize it in one place.”
Outbreaks Near Me is only available for the Apple iPhone at the moment but Brownstein and Friefeld plan to release Android and Blackberry versions soon.
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