Argus is an event-based, multi-lingual, biosurveillance system, which captures and analyzes information from publicly available internet media. Argus produces reports that summarize and contextualize direct, indirect, and enviroclimatic indications and warning (I&W) of human, animal, and plant disease events, and makes these reports available to the system’s users. Early warning of highly infectious animal diseases, like foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), is critical for the enactment of containment and/or prevention measures aiming to curb disease spread and reduce the potential for devastating trade and economic implications.
Objective
Our objective is to demonstrate how biosurveillance, using direct and indirect I&W of disease within vernacular internet news media, provides early warning and situational awareness for infectious animal diseases that have the potential for trade and economic implications in addition to detecting social disruption. Tracking of I&W during the 2010 Japan FMD epidemic and outbreaks in other Asian countries was selected to illustrate this methodology.