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Volume 360:2153-2157 May 21, 2009 Number 21 Next

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The Internet has become a critical medium for clinicians, public health practitioners, and laypeople seeking health information. Data about diseases and outbreaks are disseminated not only through online announcements by government agencies but also through informal channels, ranging from press reports to blogs to chat rooms to analyses of Web searches (see Digital Resources for Disease Detection). Collectively, these sources provide a view of global health that is fundamentally different from that yielded by the disease reporting of the traditional public health infrastructure.¹

Over the past 15 years, Internet technology has become integral to public health surveillance. Systems using informal . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Source Information

Dr. Brownstein is a faculty member at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program, Children's Hospital Boston, and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, Boston. Mr. Freifeld is a research software developer at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program in Boston and a master's candidate in the New Media Medicine Group of the MIT Media Laboratory in Cambridge, MA. Dr. Brownstein and Mr. Freifeld are the cocreators of the HealthMap system. Dr. Madoff is a professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, an infectious disease physician with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Boston, and editor of ProMED-mail, a program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases.

This article (10.1056/NEJMp0900702) was published at NEJM.org on May 7, 2009.

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