American Society for Microbiology Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Disease scientific
Project instructions:
At the American Society for Microbiology Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Disease scientific meeting I attended in Feb. 2013, it was very apparant through the
presentations that Biosurveillance and Biodetection has continued to evolve well past the biosensor type programs such as BioWatch into more of a web-crawler based
and/or SIMS monitoring system for infectious disease outbreaks. These systems were used to monitor the cholera outbreak after the Haiti earthquake as well as during
the early stages of the SARS outbreak. It has been suggested that such network analysis will allow detection of the presence of emerging infectious diseases from a
naturally or manmade causes such as bioterrorism or perhaps bioterror more rapidly than previous surveillance methods.
Thus, this week?s conference will move away from the prior terms’ foci on biosensor systems and look to the present and future trend of how outbreaks are monitored.
For the TED videos, transcript information is located through the ?Show Transcript? hyperlink button.
1. To gain an understanding of the importance of surveillance and the role of Project Argus, ISIS-Georgetown, GPHIN (The Global Public Health Intelligence Network) and
similar web-crawler surveillance networks please view the 25 min Ted Talk Larry Brilliant Wants to Stop Pandemics Make certain that you do not skip the final question
and answer discussion.
2. At first the following TED talk may seem unrelated to this topic but please persevere and watch the second half of the 20 min video ? Deb Roy: The Birth of a Word
It will demonstrate how the technology and algorithms used to data mine to evolution of a word was transformed into monitoring various social media.
3. Finally, please read Charles Schmidt 3 page paper Trending Now: Using Social Media to Predict and Track Disease Outbreaks.
If you feel that you would like more of an overview for global surveillance, I?ve also attached a report brief called Sustaining Global Surveillance and Response to
Emerging Zoonotic Diseases. It is not required reading.
Keeping in mind previous reading, homework and conferences in the course, what do you feel the pros and/or cons might be to global surveillance through a web-based
monitoring system. You have lots of things to compare it with?..the village health volunteers of Thailand, BioWatch, door-to-door surveillance mentioned by Larry
Brilliant, Project Argus, ISIS, Haitian cholera outbreak, SARS etc.
