While traditional means of surveillance by governments, multi-national agencies, and institutional networks assist in reporting and confirming infectious disease outbreaks, these formal sources of information are limited by their geographic coverage and timeliness of information flow. In contrast, rapid global reach of electronic communication has resulted in the advent of informal sources of information on outbreaks. Informal resources include discussion sites, online news media, individual and organization reports and even individual search records. The earliest descriptions of the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in Guangdon Province, south China came from informal reports. However, system development to date has been geared toward knowledge management and strategies for interpreting these data are underdeveloped. There is a need to move from simple knowledge reorganization to an analytic approach for disseminating timely yet specific signals.
Objective
Internet-based resources such as discussion sites and online news sources have become invaluable sources for a new wave of surveillance systems. The WHO relies on these informal sources for about 65% of their outbreak investigations. Despite widespread use of unstructured information there has been little, if any, data evaluation.