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Mark Smolinski
Skoll Global Threats Fund
Epidemiology is not just for public health specialists anymore, the public can now actively engage in public health reporting. Understanding disease trends in time and space can now be uncovered from a variety of data sources that range from SMS messages, blog posts, Internet searches, news sources, and conversations on social networks. Changes in the International Health Regulations have allowed innovations in surveillance and case detection to flourish using informal sources of data. The field of participatory epidemiology has evolved over time, as novel sources of big data are identified for public health benefit. More recently, self-reporting systems like Flu Near You have opened a new category of participatory epidemiology that puts the public directly into public health outbreak data. If it’s effective, Flu Near You will help us better understand how influenza spreads across the United States and, importantly, engage the public directly in combatting this yearly plague. But Flu Near You as a proof of concept is equally important. If people are willing to report symptoms on a regular basis, we can expand beyond flu to other diseases. Moreover, we can move beyond the United States to the developing world where the challenges are significantly more complex. Citizen-generated content could become a crucial cornerstone of public health, helping us not only get a better handle on known diseases, but also catch novel diseases when they emerge anywhere on the planet. We have identified participatory disease-reporting programs in Europe and Australia that we can connect to and start to get a more global view of disease movement. It may not be long before new diseases can be detected within a short enough time to dramatically reduce the risk of pandemics as digital voluntary reporting emerges across the globe. So whether we like it or not, the big data that makes up our daily activities are a prime target for early detection of disease threats. The critical question before us—do you want to be an active, willing participant, or do you want your data scraped behind the scenes? This presentation will lay out a vision for the future of participatory epidemiology and talk about how various initiatives throughout the world are exploring this evolving information source.