Wikipedia always predicts disease outbreaks before authorities

Wikipedia always predicts disease outbreaks before authorities Scientists have found that Wikipedia has been able to forecast emerging illnesses almost a month before the health officials.

Wikipedia is the biggest and probably the most convenient encyclopedia found these days. It is the savior of the homework bound, provider of all knowledge and settler of bets. Certain scientists claim that when they tracked the searches on Wikipedia, they were able to detect information on diseases four weeks before they were declared an outbreak by the health officials.

These days, infectious diseases are a leading threat to peoples’ health and the key to reducing the impact is to handle the progress of the outbreak. This can be done through disease surveillance, which traditionally depends upon regular visits to the doctor and regular laboratory testing, however, these take time. Hence, what people usually do, is to search online and seek help through social media and websites before physically going to the hospital.

According to this paper that was published in Plos Computational Biology, the scientists searched through the access logs of Wikipedia to track the pages related to these diseases. They used different languages for different locations and then compared these disease pages with the disease outbreak information as given by the national health surveillance teams. Out of the total fourteen disease location contexts that they observed, they found that eight cases showed close resemblance with the data given by the national health surveillance teams. The statistical model of the encyclopedia allowed them to forecast emerging outbreaks of influenza in Thailand, Japan, Poland and the United States. In addition, they also found close matches on the dengue cases in Thailand and Brazil and the Thai tuberculosis cases. In addition, what is impressive is that Wikipedia models were able to forecast the influenza and tuberculosis cases four weeks before the health officials.

The forecasting model, is however, not so perfect. As far as Ebola was concerned, the hampered internet traces in the locations with weak internet connectivity caused results to be affected. However, the results of the model are compelling and these can lead to a better method of surveying of infectious diseases and their outbreaks. This could become the official global disease forecasting system, if more research and development is done on the model. The main goal of this system would be to become an operational disease forecasting and monitoring system with an open source code and open data system.

Related Article: http://www.researchomatic.com/New-Research/Use-of-Wikipedia-as-a-Source-of-Information-136308.html