aaronsw's blog

Healthmap is a pretty interesting project which debuted today. It automatically data-mines news and other sources for emerging disease outbreaks and then plots them on a map. Both polio and measles are included in their data-mining of disease outbreaks; working in immunizations these are two diseases I am especially interested in seeing.

I will be upgrading the entire site soon to simplify and refocus on the most beneficial parts of Swala.org. Fulltime work has kept me quite busy lately but I plan to put in added energy to make Swala successful! Please stay tuned!

-Aaron

I caught an interesting article this morning on the second page of the Wall Street Journal. Written by Nick Timiraos, it is entitled "Why a Market-Driven Vaccine Plan Faces Big Obstacles". Its a summary outlook on the recent developments concerning how to complete the development of vaccines whose major customer base is located in developing countries (i.e the poorest of the poor).

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! As we ring in the new year, an interesting read for us Global Health folks is the recently released World Health Organization's review of notable Public Health issues in 2007. Read the review here.

The LA Times today came out with a full-featured investigation into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and how their investments have had what the LA Times believes are unintended negative side-effects. The full article can be found here.

So its been just over six weeks since the beta launch of Swala.org and already we have had a number of new members sign up and a fair bit of global health jobs posted to the JobsBoard which is the major section up and running. I wanted to point out to everyone one of the "cool" features of the Career Center section and that how visitors can see the global health jobs and organizations mapped out using Google Maps. Its basically a mashup (or combination) of the jobs posted on our site and google maps.

I am proud to announce the launch of Swala.org after a summer of work preparing the site, designing graphics, configuring the system and determing the right elements. There is still quite a bit of work to do on the site, but I feel that it is at a point where it features quite a bit of good resources and the available features are fully functional. So, you may ask, what is functional?

I'm excited to say that tomorrow will be the day for the beta launch of Swala.org. I have enough of the components on the site working that I feel like it is ready for users to give it a whirl. Until then....