Google’s non-profit arms seems to be joining the Gates Foundation in taking up arms against infectious diseases. Their Predict and Prevent program plans to use information and technology to “empower communities to predict and prevent emerging threats before they become local, regional, or global crises.” Current focus is on
- Hot spot identification: The goal here is to use data to understand the drivers that can help communities identify surprises. This will require a lot of information sharing.
- Enable rapid response: This is the part I find fascinating. How can we use data and act on it? How do we empower communities to self-organize?
Currently Google.org is looking to partner with people working on
- Collection of specimens at the human/animal interface to identify and map hot spots
- Innovative, event-based surveillance at the community level in the developing world
- Integrated vulnerability mapping to the drivers of emerging infectious diseases
Those are all fascinating areas and would be interesting to see whom they end up working one. One problem I have seen with the tech community when it comes to health and science is an emphasis on the cool without thinking through some of the more fundamental issues.
Further reading:
Using the Semantic Web and social networks to track disease
Technorati Tags: Google.org, Infectious Diseases
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Pernicious Attire (PA) is an attempt to spread awareness of existing and emerging infectious diseases around the world through fashion.
The idea to design these shirts was borne from an emerging infectious disease lecture during a Fall 2007 general biology course.
http://www.varianceclothing.com/pernicious%20attire.htm