Europe gets health check tech

The European Commission has developed a system that alerts public health officials to potential threats by sorting information from news websites.

The MediSys system provides European health authorities with real-time information on developing health hazards such as disease outbreaks or industrial accidents.

The system collects and sorts data from more than 1,000 news websites and 120 public health sites in 32 different languages - and uses email and SMS to automatically alert health officials, giving them timely warnings of possible hazards.

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During the recent foot and mouth outbreak in the UK, for example, the proliferation of news reports on the issue triggered alerts to be sent to public health officials across Europe.

The European Commission says while other systems can monitor certain data - such as death rates or hospital admissions - they can miss public health threats reported in the press or other sources that MediSys will pick up.

MediSys uses keywords to sort information into three categories: 'diseases', 'bioterrorism' and 'other threats'. The information is then sorted into more specific categories, such as particular disease types.

An automatic diease incident detection system, which complements MediSys and has been developed with the University of Helsinki, is also up and running.

The system extracts information - such as the number of cases, location and date - from English news reports. This information is then fed into a database and can be accessed by the EC, member states and EU citizens.