Who Is Sick? is a new Web service that provide a sense of your community's health by enabling people who live there to share information about the local spread of diseases. You can anonymously post your own sickness information and use the Google Maps interface to search and filter sicknesses by symptoms, sex, age, and, of course, location. It's also interesting to look at the percentage breakdown of symptoms–like runny nose, cough, or stomach ache–in a particular area. The concept is something like a modern day version of the famous map that Dr. John Snow and Henry Whitehead created to track the spread of Cholera through London in 1854, a tale beautifully told in Steven Johnson's book The Ghost Map.
From the Who Is Sick? blog:
The CDC (Center for Disease Control) provides flu data but only to the State level and only on a time scale of 1 week. For example, they will report that in the state of California, last week, there were 539 cases of the flu reported. While this information may be useful for some health practitioners or academics, for the average individual, this does not come in handy when they are trying to figure out what kinds of sicknesses are going around their area. It is not local enough, timely enough, or broad enough because they don't cover different types of sicknesses.
In contract, whoissick provides local (down to the zip code level), timely (within a day), and broad (many different symptoms, not just the flu) sickness information. Some typical use cases for a user would be
1. I am feeling a little sick and want to check what sicknesses are going around in my local area – probably within 10 or 20 miles from where I live or work.
2. I am traveling to another area of the country and want to know if there are sicknesses going around that I need to be careful of
3. I live in an area where I notice lots of people getting sick, so in preparation, I can take an AirBorne or vitamins to prevent catching anything
To date, the only way to get information like this is probably to call multiple places (hospitals, doctors, clinics, schools, etc) and ask what is currently going around. Not very organized or efficient.We hope to change this.
Link (Thanks, Eric Paulos!)
