Digital Disease Detection

Volume 360:2153-2157 May 21, 2009 Number 21

Harnessing the Web for Public Health Surveillance

John S. Brownstein, Ph.D., Clark C. Freifeld, B.S., and Lawrence C. Madoff, M.D.

The Internet has become a critical medium for clinicians, public health practitioners, and laypeople seeking health information. Data about diseases and outbreaks are disseminated not only through online announcements by government agencies but also through informal channels, ranging from press reports to blogs to chat rooms to analyses of Web searches (see Digital Resources for Disease Detection). Collectively, these sources provide a view of global health that is fundamentally different from that yielded by the disease reporting of the traditional public health infrastructure.¹

Over the past 15 years, Internet technology has become integral to public health surveillance. Systems using informal electronicinformation have been credited with reducing the time to recognition of an outbreak, preventing governments from suppressing outbreak information, and facilitating public health responses to outbreaks and emerging diseases. Because Web-based sources frequently contain data not captured through traditional government communication channels, they are useful to public health agencies, including the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network of the World Health Organization (WHO), which relies on such sources for daily surveillance activities./.../