( From Boing Boing) Tired of waiting three weeks for the official and reliable CDC figures on a state-wide level? Now you can get (and make) a local community real-time map of who has what. We have no idea yet how accurate this will be and what biases this sort of data collection will bring, but it is free and fast and may ultimately help people plan and cut down disease transmission by changing people's plans. Or it could be hijacked and just cause trouble. As with any web-2 empowered user tool, it will take some settling time (and a server upgrade or two!)
I have a suspicion that the creators of the site will be learning some lessons soon, if they don't know, on how informative or politically helpful/volatile this kind of information can be.
Who Is Sick? user-generated epidemiology map
Posted by David Pescovitz, April 19, 2007 8:04 PM
Who Is Sick? is a new Web service that provide a sense of your community's health by enabling people who live there to share information about the local spread of diseases. You can anonymously post your own sickness information and use the Google Maps interface to search and filter sicknesses by symptoms, sex, age, and, of course, location. It's also interesting to look at the percentage breakdown of symptoms--like runny nose, cough, or stomach ache--in a particular area. The concept is something like a modern day version of the famous map that Dr. John Snow and Henry Whitehead created to track the spread of Cholera through London in 1854, a tale beautifully told in Steven Johnson's book The Ghost Map .
From the Who Is Sick? blog: (Which seems to be overwhelmed with hits at the moment).
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