new Global Health Tool: HealthMap

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 like how it links to the report and I also like how many filters are available for it. Its a project put together by Clark Freifeld, a research software developer for the Boston Children's Hospital Informatics Program and by researchers at Harvard Medical School.

Here's a summary article on it from Scientific American: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=world-wide-wellness

And Healthmap is located here: http://www.healthmap.org