Ebola Mappers Track Epidemic in Real Time
By Nikita Japra
NBCNews.com
Nov. 23, 2014
In a darkened Boston conference room, staring at projections from a laptop, John Brownstein is far from the front lines of the fight against Ebola. But the epidemiologist’s work may help change the course of the epidemic.
The disease forecaster and his team are combing through news reports, tweets and Facebook posts to anticipate the disease’s next move — and help those on the ground head it off before the crisis grows.
“There are all these places where people are talking about disease outbreaks and the impact of infectious disease, but they were sort of scattered across tens of thousands of sources around the web,” Brownstein told NBC News. “We came up with this idea of, what if we just start scraping the Web, organize all the world’s content, bring a one-view approach to all this data and actually build our own surveillance system.”
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