HealthMap could be extra helpful in places where access to public health information is hard to come by. For instance China, whose official line for a while back in 2002 and 2003 was "SARS? I don't know what you're talking about. There' no one dying of a mysterious disease here."

And according to the Wired article, plans could be in the works to bring Healthmap down to the street level:

Back in 2006, Google.org head Larry Brilliant told Wired.com about his vision for a service that looks a lot like HealthMap.

"I envision a kid (in Africa) getting online and finding that there is an outbreak of cholera down the street. I envision someone in Cambodia finding out that there is leprosy across the street," Brilliant said.

HealthMap doesn't have quite that level of resolution just yet — outbreaks are only mapped to the state/province level...

Knowing about outbreaks as they happen is a good thing, and potentially really empowering, but HealthMappers and Larry Brilliant seem to be wandering into a privacy minefield.

A house-by-house account of who's got what disease would sure help out public health researchers, but what would it do to a community? Should I be able to find out who on my block has Hepatitis, Dengue Fever, or HIV? And to what extent is someone suffering from that disease allowed to not tell anyone about it? That's a tough question, but one that'll need answering before HealthMap goes hyper-local.

Source: PLoS Medicine via Wired

Wild animals are the most likely bearers of the next plague — 60% of epidemics are from "zoonoses," diseases that jump from animals to humans living in close proximity. The more that human populations spread into previously-uninhabited areas, the more likely we are to rub up against some viruses that the local fauna are resistant to, while we are not.

According to the Earth Institute at Columbia University:

In the new study, researchers from four institutions analyzed 335 emerging diseases from 1940 to 2004, then converted the results into maps correlated with human population density, population changes, latitude, rainfall and wildlife biodiversity. They showed that disease emergences have roughly quadrupled over the past 50 years. Some 60% of the diseases traveled from animals to humans (such diseases are called zoonoses) and the majority of those came from wild creatures. With data corrected for lesser surveillance done in poorer countries, "hot spots" jump out in areas spanning sub-Saharan Africa, India and China; smaller spots appear in Europe, and North and South America.

"We are crowding wildlife into ever-smaller areas, and human population is increasing," said coauthor Marc Levy, a global-change expert at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), an affiliate of Columbia University's Earth Institute. "The meeting of these two things is a recipe for something crossing over." The main sources are mammals. Some pathogens may be picked up by hunting or accidental contact; others, such as Malaysia's Nipah virus, go from wildlife to livestock, then to people. Humans have evolved no resistance to zoonoses, so the diseases can be extraordinarily lethal.

Scientists Make First Map of Emerging Disease Hotspots [Earth Institute]

The researchers also assumed that we'd be using the same disease-fighting methods we used in the SARS outbreak. This map doesn't mean that huge chunks of the world will soon be wiped out by a pandemic. It's actually, according to the researchers, a warning. They want national health organizations to be aware which areas of the world need better systems for handling viral outbreaks. That way, flu doesn't reach epidemic proportions and shoot all over the world. Of course, if governments handle the next epidemic it the way they did in 28 Weeks Later and Resident Evil: Extinction, this "help" might come in the form of nukes.

Predicting Outbreaks [BMC Medicine]