Europe installs public health threat monitor

The European Commission has launched an automated medical intelligence system to trawl the net looking for early warning signs of public health threats, such as epidemics, large-scale industrial accidents and bio-terrorism.

MediSys scans over 1,000 news sites and 120 public health databases in 32 languages to provide health authorities with real-time knowledge. It has already showed its effectiveness in the foot and mouth outbreak in the UK.

Previous systems have monitored only historical data, such as death rates, emergency admissions, trends in prescriptions and other public health statistical anomalies.

By providing real-time information, MediSys will enable public authorities to react more quickly to potential health threats, according to the Commission.

Based on the level of articles retrieved and the detected keywords, an automatic alert is sent by email and SMS to decision-makers who are on permanent standby.

For example, in the recent foot and mouth outbreak, MediSys detected a sudden jump in news reports and automatically sent alerts to public health officials across Europe.

Citizens can also have free access to the scanning tool, which includes email alerts.