Swine Flu Near? Ask Your iPhone

For anyone worried about the nascent swine flu outbreaks across the country, a new iPhone application, called Outbreaks Near Me, allows users to track flu outbreaks, and even submit new flu cases, almost in real time.

"This is a new way to disseminate information to a device that everyone has on them all the time," said John Brownstein of Childrens Hospital Boston and who, along with Clark Freifeld of the MIT Media Lab, developed Outbreaks Near Me.

"This is about education, getting people to understand the epidemiology of infectious disease. We want to encourage basic prevention practices, like good day-to-day hygiene and vaccinations."

Outbreaks Near Me receives data from HealthMap, a Web site also developed by Freifeld and Brownstein, that scans through reports from the Centers for Disease Control and news articles to create detailed reports on outbreaks from salmonella to swine flu worldwide.

More recently, HealthMap has scanned through blogs and Twitter to alert public health officials of potential disease outbreaks even sooner.

"This new iPhone app takes HealthMap another step forward," said Brownstein. "This way public health officials don't have to keep going back to the Web site and check it all the time."

For anyone with an iPhone or iPod Touch, Outbreaks Near Me can be downloaded through the Apple iTunes Store. Once loaded, the app pops up and users can see where disease outbreaks are happening in almost real time.

Outbreaks Near Me doesn't just publish data, it also gathers data. Using the Outbreaks Near me application, iPhone users can submit confirmed or suspected cases of swine flu as well.

Age, disease, location, even a photo can all be submitted via the user submit feature on Outbreaks Near Me. In the weeks since HealthMap's mobile launch, several hundred diseases have been self-reported. For now, all of those reports have to be manually sorted, although an automated system is being developed.

Most of the information on HealthMap comes from verified sources, such as CDC and World Health Organization reports, as well as news stories about outbreaks. Complete, verified reports take time, however, time public health officials could be using to contain an outbreak.

Whether or not Outbreaks Near Me will ultimately reduce the number of people infected with swine flu or other diseases is debatable, say Freifeld and Brownstein.

"We think that having more information and being more informed is better than...when you don't know what is happening," said Freifeld. "We want people to use their own good judgment to interpret the information to make a decision about whether they should travel to a particular place."

Right now Outbreaks Near Me is only available for the iPhone, although Brownstein and Freifeld are working on adapting the software for use on Android and Blackberry phones as well.

"I think that in general HealthMap and this new iPhone app make public health surveillance data more user-friendly," said Hannah Gould, a scientist with the Centers for Disease Control.

"What's nice is that this new app integrates all the information from all these sources and so you can visualize it in one place."