Top Five Health & Disease Monitoring and Warning Sources

Google made big news this week by launching Google Flu Trends – showing considerable Early Warning potential of search terms trends analysis. According to the NY Times, ‘early tests suggest that the service may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.’ This would seem like a good time to share our favorite open sources on the subject of global health and disease outbreaks:

1. CDC – The Center for Disease Control and Prevention publishes multiple feeds and updates.
2. HealthMap – A classic and beautifully-executed mashup of news sources, medical bulletins, and official alerts. Created by by Clark Freifeld and John Brownstein.
3. ProMed-mail – A program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases. Offers multiple email channel subscriptions.
4. MedISys – A real-time news alert system for medical and health-related topics maintained by the Health Threats Unit at Directorate General Health and Consumer Affairs of the European Commission.
5. Global Health Atlas – Maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO) which also publishes a Disease Outbreak News Feed (XML).

Honorable mention goes to Pandemicflu.gov – only excluded from the list above because of its more narrow focus – and HHS.gov by the US Department of Health and Human Services.