Disease Watch

 Disease Watch is a web application that ingests real-time open source media to identify and characterize global disease outbreaks or pre-cursor events (natural disasters, civil unrest) that could increase the likelihood of an outbreak. 

About Disease Watch

Disease Watch leverages research methods that FPDI originally developed for global food system disruptions and applies those methods to infectious disease surveillance. While valuable data exists to detect emerging disease outbreaks, analyzing and monitoring this data is made difficult both by the sheer amount of information and differences in data structure across systems. FPDI has developed a prototype technology that utilizes an innovative approach to address these challenges and improve infectious disease surveillance and situational awareness. Disease Watch facilitates comprehensive coding of articles using an ontology developed by FPDI. The ontology codes each article according to more than 30 concepts referred to as classes and subclasses. These concepts include time, place, signs and symptoms, disease agent, social behavior, travel restrictions, response efforts, etc. Articles related to the same outbreak or pre-cursor event are then grouped together into a “case.” FPDI is using the technology to develop a library of past cases.

For more information on Disease Watch, please contact the FoodSHIELD Coordinator  at coordinator@foodshield.org.