Do you always check the weather before you leave the house? Maybe you should look at a disease map too. From next month, people in the US can use a new app and website called that tracks 15 different diseases across the country, including the common cold, flu, Lyme disease, and glandular fever. Checking the outlook might make you grab a bottle of hand sanitiser as well as your umbrella.
The tracker will get its information from around 900,000 clinics, obtaining anonymised data from the reports doctors send to insurance companies.
Providing that doctors keep up to date with their admin, Doctors Report can produce a daily snapshot of disease zip code, with the option of showing the results by age group too. For each disease, the chart shows a severity rating from 1 to 10, related to the number of cases in the area.
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“If you’re sick for five days, that’s a serious life event. It’s worth understanding what’s happening in your area,” says Dan Shaw, creator of Doctors Report. The tracker will be available through their website, as well as on the App Store, Google Play and Amazon.
Protect yourself
Armed with Doctors Report, Shaw says there are some preventative measures you can take to try to stay healthy. Upping your personal hygiene regime and minimising handshakes might seem like a drag, but if it’s just for a short period while an infection passes through a town, people might stick with it.
Additionally, people with children may wish to avoid certain areas, as might those with weakened immune systems.
“For a lot of people this could be a good thing, and might even encourage people to take more responsibility for their health. But it could also cause issues for the medical community if others use it to spread misinformation,” says at the University of Cambridge.
Though Doctors Report provides some advice, Drumright says it could be improved. “I was surprised that there wasn’t any information on maintaining one’s own health, eg regular sleep, exercise, healthy diet,” says Drumright. And some of the diseases that can be tracked seem unusual.
People don’t really transmit MRSA to each other, so tracking it will only be “useful for hospitals and care homes, but not the public”, she says.
The system may also miss large sections of the country. “The poorer population will have the highest burden of disease, but they won’t be recorded because they will be uninsured,” she says. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already provides a few weekly reports for some diseases and does not rely on insurance documents, .
Shaw and his team plan to extend Doctors Report first to Canada and then elsewhere. They will also add alerts so that you will be notified if there are big changes in the severity of a disease in your area.
