2009-03-14

Search + Internet = Better Public Health?

Our very own John Brownstein, has just published an article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal which demonstrates the consequences of removing information bottlenecks between the public and population-level analytics. Some have expressed skepticism regarding the value of mining web-activity for "objective" reporting but, in this instance at least, it seems that a distributed network of non-experts can be effective in detecting outbreaks earlier than through standard surveillance methods.

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