WASHINGTON - Disease statistics buried within patient records or detailed in newspaper clippings can be sorted and organised to depict geographic patterns, allowing the discovery of trends that were previously overlooked, says a new study.“The use of interactive maps and graphs, combined with word search interfaces, can lead to greater insight into complex events like the spread of Swine flu,” said Frank Hardisty, research associate and geographer at Penn State University’s GeoVISTA Centre.The GeoViz Toolkit is a user-friendly application that combines text mining with geographical mapping. It allows users to publicly search available data to identify and visualise data patterns for their own interests or concerns.The GeoViz application allows users to easily manipulate the software to change time and location, as well as how the data is viewed. The user can thus visualize the pattern of how the disease spreads and determine how quickly it progresses from one area to the next.The flexible software package allows someone with no programming experience to navigate the application, while also providing different components and analytical tools for experienced analysts.“Potential applications range from research in public health — infectious disease dynamics, cancer etiology, surveillance and control — through analysis of socioeconomic and demographic data, to exploration of patterns of incidents related to terrorism or crime,” said Hardisty.Many sources for disease and crime statistics — newspaper articles for example — are in a semi-structured format that do not clearly present the data in a table or graph, but rather bury it within the text of the document.To obtain high-quality, relevant information from these documents, researchers use “text analytics” or “text mining” allowing them to retrieve only applicable information, like the date and description of a disease-related death, from the flood of information usually included in a newspaper clipping.“An example would be searching a database of H1N1 flu reports for ‘child’ or ‘children’ and seeing if there is spatial clustering in the relative frequency of those reports,” Hardisty told attendees at the 2010 Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Bird flu: Threat persists in five countries
Rome, April 16 (IANS/AKI) The deadly H5N1 avian flu virus has been eradicated in almost all the 63 countries it infected at the peak of the world outbreak in 2006, but persists in five countries and poses a continuing threat to global animal and human health.The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation’s chief veterinary officer, Juan Lubroth said despite the considerable success achieved against H5N1 bird flu virus, it remained in Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam and China.“The progressive control of H5N1 in such countries remains an international priority,” Lubroth said.“Though public attention shifted to the H1N1 influenza pandemic for most of 2009, H5N1 continues to be a serious menace.”He was speaking ahead of an international conference on animal and pandemic influenza to be held in Vietnam Monday.“We should not forget that it has killed 292 humans, killed or forced the culling of more than 260 million birds, caused an estimated 20 billion dollars of economic damage across the globe and devastated livelihoods at the family-farm level,” he said in a statement.“As long as it is present in even one country, there is still a public health risk to be taken seriously.”The H5N1 strain of avian influenza remains established in places where tens of millions of domestic ducks are found and there is significant industrial broiler production.The H5N1 virus was first shown to have passed from birds to humans in 1997, during an outbreak of avian influenza among poultry in Hong Kong.More than 90 percent of birds who get H5N1 die, and mortality among humans is also high.–IANS/AKI
