Avoid Germs and Stay Healthy – New Website Tracks the Spread of Sickness
GermTrax (GermTrax.com) is a website that collects sickness and disease data from users around the world and displays trends via an interactive Health Map.
Rather than attempting to pinpoint exactly where and when you got sick, GermTrax uses broader strokes to map all of the places you potentially got sick. The site collects information actively through user submissions (and geo-location data when users sync their social media accounts with the site), as well as passively through backend web-crawling technology.
At the local level, this information might illuminate a particularly unhealthy location (for example, if 50 people reported “gastrointestinal problems” from the same restaurant around the same time). At the global level, GermTrax can help individuals and health agencies discover large-scale sickness trends.
In addition to allowing users to log their own sicknesses and see those of others, the site’s capabilities include a "Trends" tab that lets users explore GermTrax’s database by sickness type, location and date, as well as a custom “Alerts” function that will notify users when sicknesses are reported near them (or any location they specify).
