The Larry Brilliant presentation at TED 2006 is a must see [Download the video Duration: 26:3]
Brilliant is a special man, evidenced by the fact that he was recently named Executive Director of the Google Foundation. And because Dr. Brilliant is the epidemiologist who presided over the last case of Smallpox on the planet, he is a “go to guy” for a strategy to dodge the next pandemic, which could, of course, be the Avian Flu.
Dr. Brilliant repeats over and over that “early detection and early response” is our only chance to avoid the next pandemic. He explains how Ron St. John’s Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) found SARS some six months before WHO. Similary GPHIN found Avian Flu in Iran last September.
GPHIN uses human interpretation of red-flags detected by a web crawler that is looking at about 20 sites, mostly periodicals — in only seven languages. The data mining software used is Nstein.
Brilliant proposes a vastly expanded global early detection program — to be based upon GPHIN, but in at least 20 languages. The proposed acronym is INSTEDD [international system for early disease detection], which shows its TED roots. “INSTEDD of a hidden pandemic of bird flu, we find it and immediately contain it”. He says the detect/respond facility will also be able to deal with novel bio-terror viruses, industrial accidents, famine, etc.
Aside from the technology of detection, Brilliant believes it is critical that INSTEDD be private, independent of any government. He gives examples of serious response delays at WHO due to its siting within the UN.
There may be a connection between Brilliant’s new role with the Google Foundation and his INSTEDD proposal. Google is the best-qualified and prepared organization on the planet to implement the technology side. E.g., Google has under development what is probably the most capable machine-translation system - based upon statistical rather than rule-based methods. The rest of required infrastructure is obvious.
Technorati Tags: Medicine, Public Health
Disease surveillance using handheld devices for field data collection in developing countries would really be appropriate use of technology that has the potential to plug into INSTEDD and GPHIN