The Global Public Health Intelligence Network uses machine-to-machine communication to search and filter Internet reports in various languages for information that may relate to public health threats—viral outbreaks, contaminated water supplies, famine, etc. It then passes the results on as HITs to be analyzed by officials at Canada's Public Health Agency.
Any organization may pay a fee to subscribe. While the subscription service is perhaps intended primarily for government or philanthropic health organizations, medical publishers could no doubt benefit from this service as well (as could anyone running a conspiracy theory website).
It's so effective that in February of 2006, Larry Brilliant, head of Google's philanthropic division, committed a $100,000 grant from the Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference to a project that will use GPHIN as the basis for an International System for Total Early Disease Detection.
I didn't find any info on how that's progressing so far—it may be one of those projects for which a 2–4 month time-to-launch does not apply.
Monday, October 8, 2007
Canada's GPHIN
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2 comments:
Micaela: thx for picking up on this. You may want to read the second half of that (long, yes) post that you linked to about GPHIN and INSTEDD:
http://www.lunchoverip.com/2006/03/can_the_interne.html
There are many updates about the project, including the fact that Larry Brilliant has decided NOT to base his search-and-alert system on GPHIN anymore, preferring to build a new one from scratch, and more.
Thank you for pointing out that out! Class, you can see more information on the current status of INSTEDD here.
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