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Fighting Zika with Big Data

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Mosquitoby Angela Guess

Greg Gillespie recently wrote in Health Data Management, “The Zika virus is sending a chill down the collective spine of healthcare providers and government agencies. So far, Brazil has confirmed nearly 3,000 cases of pregnant women infected with the virus, and the disease is spreading through the Americas. Kamran Khan says there’s a singular truth about the spread of infectious diseases: ‘If you start to analyze the situation when an outbreak occurs, you’re already too late.’ Khan, an infectious disease physician and scientist at Toronto-based St. Michael’s Hospital, has spent his career combating the likes of Zika, Ebola, Lassa Fever and other lethal and long-simmering infectious diseases that have reared up in unexpected places and sown public panic and death.”

Gillespie goes on, “After seeing that dynamic play out in his hometown of Toronto during an infectious disease outbreak in 2003, Khan became the founder and driving force behind BlueDot, a Toronto-based for-profit social enterprise company focused on combining web-based technologies and big data with epidemic expertise to get ahead of the curve on infectious diseases and give public health and government officials time to anticipate when, where and how hard they’ll be hit.”

He continues, “The BioDiaspora platform that fuels BlueDot’s efforts was developed in 2008 at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at St. Michael’s Hospital. In 2013, the platform was incorporated as a for-profit company, and in 2014, it was rebranded as BlueDot. The company, which received funding from the Li Ka Shing institute and tech investors, has 40 staff members and combines the efforts of infectious disease specialists, data scientists, researchers and computer engineers with reams of real-time data on some 4 billion commercial flight itineraries; human, animal and insect population data; climate data from satellites; and news reports of disease outbreaks.”

Read more here.

Photo credit: Flickr

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