Disease Outbreak Warning System

In 2011 the Whooping Cough infected several people in a suburban Chicago high school. The disease spread from group to group infecting dozens of people.

As the disease spread a small business called Sickweather LLC discovered the trends of people posting about the whooping cough on Twitter and Facebook.

Nowadays the US government is trying to expand their use of social media to detect possible outbreaks and biological attacks.

Assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University stated that, "That’s the Holy Grail, we’d love these systems to tell us there’s a brand new disease and it’s going to be a big thing.”

Disease outbreak systems have received mixed reviews, many have cited Google Flu Trends as their basis for argument. Stating that Google incorrectly overestimated the number of flu cases that were actually present.

However Google has stated that the system was never intended to be used by itself.

I feel that a disease outbreak system would be a highly helpful tool in American society. With the mass number of people that we have living in America it is not always easy to detect outbreaks until they have already begun. I feel that with a tool like the disease outbreak system we can better combat the problem head on and get a better handle on epidemics before they engulf the nation.

I feel the more knowledge that we have on diseases and other biological entities the better served we will be.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-11/disease-outbreak-warnings-via-social-media-sought-by-u-s-.html