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.

Money Laundering: Reference Reports Update

Security and Legal departments of financial institutions and multinational organizations may want to take note of a couple of recent publications on the subject of money laundering. The International Monetary Fund just released a detailed assessment of Gibraltar Anti-Money Laundering (AMF) and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) efforts. The report lists not only the core aspects of these activities but some of their shortcomings and various recommendations of good reference value. Also, earlier this month, The U.S. Departments of Treasury, Justice, and Homeland Security issued the 2007 National Money Laundering Strategy, “a report detailing continued efforts to dismantle money laundering and terrorist financing networks and bring these criminals to justice.” Not be forgotten is the regularly-updated Specially Designated Individuals List maintained by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) within the US Treasury.

Country Reports on Terrorism 2006

Since 2004, the US State Department’s Patterns of Global Terrorism report has been replaced by the Country Reports on Terrorism. The reports, which are published annually by April 30 and are compiled with data provided by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), can be found here.

Darfur: Updated Crisis Guides

The Council on Foreign Relations has just released a concise, informative and visually stunning compendium of the ongoing genocide in the Sudan. The Darfur Crisis Guide includes narrated, interactive timelines, maps and images in a format capable of raising awareness in the many who still fear exploring this pressing human tragedy. Additional meta-sources on the subject are the dedicated Darfur analysis sites by the BBC, the International Crisis Group and ReliefWeb.

Russian Political Parties: A Current Status Report

Another valuable analysis and summary report by the International Relations and Security Network: Issue 19 “of the Russian Analytical Digest discusses the role of political parties in Russia. It looks at the realignment of the party system, the list of officially registered parties in 2007, and the regional dimension of the Russian elections in 2007 and 2008.” Previous reports from the Russian Digest series can be found here.

Terrorism Trends and the Iraq War

Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank – research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law – published an extensive study on Jihadist terrorism trends in relation to the Iraq. Based on data from the MIPT-RAND Terrorism Knowledge Base, the study concludes that the war “has resulted in a seven-fold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks . . . And even when attacks in both Afghanistan and Iraq (the two countries that together account for 80 percent of attacks and 67 percent of deaths since the invasion of Iraq) are excluded, there has still been a significant rise in jihadist terrorism elsewhere . . .” The study, including its data tables, can be found in the March-April issue of Mother Jones.

Global Risks Data: WEF 2007 Report & Maps

In case you missed it, on January 10, the World Economic Forum released its Global Risks Report 2007 which ’suggests that many of the 23 core global risks explored in the report have worsened over the last 12 months, despite growing awareness of their potential impacts.’ The WEF Global Risk Network pages contain numerous useful links to risk data sources and an excellent collection of interactive risk maps provided by Maplecroft (their site provides the same maps, data sets for purchase and also the welcome option to download mapping data in KML (for your very own Google Earth) and World Wind format.

Baghdad Violence Map

The BBC has published a well executed interactive map of deadly incidents throughout the city since 2003. The data is derived from various sources, including the International Medical Corps and the Iraq Body Count. Notably, only incidents with ten or more casualties are actually displayed on the satellite image of the city.

Bibliography 2.0: New Ways to Keep (Good) Old Habits

The Web is making it too easy for many of us to forget the importance of good references and a solid bibliography when conducting research or compiling reports. The flattening of Internet-based information should in fact suggest an even more rigorous source qualification and citation process, even though the traditional classification models may be somewhat inadequate for today, and no effective, widespread standard has emerged. Zotero has recently launched its beta Firefox extension which combines classic bibliographic reference collection features with new (and upcoming) technologies such as tagging, advanced search, sharing, etc.. In this case, 2.0 also means free – which is another reason to give it a chance.

DHS Metropolitan Interoperable Communications Rating

The US Department of Homeland Security has released the Tactical Interoperable Communications Scorecards (PDF) report which addresses “the maturity of tactical interoperable communications capabilities in 75 urban/metropolitan1 areas . . . [and] focuses on Governance, Standard Operating Procedures (SOP), and Usage elements of the SAFECOM Interoperability Continuum.” This data could be relevant if you and your team are building risk maps of US locations.