Tracking Viruses in the Comfort of Your Home

Using funding from Google.org's Predict and Prevent Initiative, researchers at Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School have launched HealthMap, a website that aggregates information from sources like Google News, WHO, and online discussion groups to track disease outbreaks. The system uses color-coded maps to alert site visitors to where news about emerging disease is happening. "The idea of HealthMap is to get filtered, valuable information to the public and public health community in one freely available resource,” says co-founder John Brownstein in a Wired story.