New England Journal of Medicine
Volume 362 — May 6, 2010 — Number 18
http://content.nejm.org/current.shtml

Special Report
Information Technology and Global Surveillance of Cases of 2009 H1N1 Influenza
J. S. Brownstein and Others

The widespread adoption of increasingly sophisticated forms of information technology has paralleled the increase in rapid and far-reaching international travel. The emergence and global spread of the 2009 pandemic influenza A (H1N1) virus illustrated not only the hazards of an interconnected world, but also the powerful role of new methods for detecting, tracking, and responding to infectious diseases. Although formal reporting, surveillance, and response structures remain essential to protecting public health, a new generation of freely accessible, online, and real-time informatics tools for disease tracking are expanding the ability of public health professionals to detect weak signals across borders and to raise earlier warnings of emerging disease threats.

The HealthMap H1N1 System
HealthMap (http://healthmap.org) is an example of a new effort in transparent, global, public health surveillance. The HealthMap system combines automated, around-the-clock data collection and processing with expert review and analysis to aggregate reports according to type of disease and geographic location. HealthMap sifts through large volumes of information on events, obtained from a broad range of online sources in multiple languages, to provide a comprehensive view of ongoing global disease activity through a freely available Web site…