Taha Kass-Hout*, Assistant Professor, Emory University, Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Atlanta, GA, USA. InSTEDD, Director of Health Informatics, Palo Alto, CA, USA Track: General Track Presentation Topic: Public (e-)health, population health technologies, surveillance Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: MaRS Centre Room: CR3 Date: 2008-09-04 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM Last modified: 2008-08-27

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While not an entirely new concept, biosurveillance has been gaining importance in the modern world. In recent history, the geographic isolation between plants and animals has been gradually broken by the intentional or natural transport of organisms through human travel, tourism or trade. Today, the rate at which species are moving between different bio-geographic regions is unprecedented, resulting in adverse ecological, economic, and human health consequences.
Additionally, global environmental changes have continued to grow rapidly throughout the past five years. These changes to climate, transport networks, disease pathogens and their vectors do not respect administrative boundaries, and their influences and impacts are best addressed on a global scale. These factors have contributed to an environment where new disease threats can spread globally within hours or days. This requires biosurveillance systems to be cross-disciplinary and to support global collaboration. Over the last decade, the majority of the designs, analyses and evaluations of these systems have been geared towards specific data sources and detection algorithms. Much less effort has been focused on how these systems will "interact" with humans. For example, consider multiple domain experts working at different levels across different organizations in an environment where numerous biosurveillance algorithms may provide contradictory interpretations of ongoing events. The aim of this presentation is to discuss the anticipated contribution of social networking and collaborative technologies to address these emerging issues.