David Baxter PhD
Late Founder
SickCity tells you what illnesses affect your town
by TRALEE PEARCE, Globe and Mail
April 16, 2009 a
You check the weather report before leaving the house each day. What if you could find out what illnesses were on the horizon for your city? Maybe you'd decide to pack your pocket-sized anti-bacterial gel, skip the subway or pop some extra vitamins.
That's the promise of www.sickcity.org, a website that delivers "real-time disease detection." The site scans Twitter messages (and, soon, Facebook pages) for mentions of common afflictions such as the chicken pox and the flu. Totals are posted for dozens of cities around the world, along with the original individual messages and bar graphs indexing each bug or complaint. It joins a growing group of illness-tracking sites, such as flutweet.com and google.org/flutrends.
Yesterday, Toronto ranked eighth in SickCity's list of "10 Sickest Cities." (New York was No. 1.)
The numbers are still sparse: Only nine Toronto posters had flu on their radar yesterday, for instance. But the site is poised to deliver news for more than 25 Canadian towns and cities.
And while it isn't giving the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or Health Canada a run for their money just yet, and statistics are clearly skewed, SickCity does offer hypochondriacs a dose of humour.
Toronto poster suziedingwall, for example, reported being in the 42nd hour of her flu battle: "Down to feeling sweaty all the time with persistent nagging headache. Like being a big firm lawyer all over again."
Fellow sufferer daveshumka of Vancouver is deliriously poetic: "Feelin' fluish, phlegmish, Flemish, phlegmatic, flu manchu."
In New York, LauraVogel opined: "It'd be really great if I never got food poisoning, EVER again. Tried solid food. Failed."
Social-networking possibilities abound. Perhaps these temporary shut-ins may find solace in each other, typing over cups of weak tea between frequent bathroom breaks.
by TRALEE PEARCE, Globe and Mail
April 16, 2009 a
You check the weather report before leaving the house each day. What if you could find out what illnesses were on the horizon for your city? Maybe you'd decide to pack your pocket-sized anti-bacterial gel, skip the subway or pop some extra vitamins.
That's the promise of www.sickcity.org, a website that delivers "real-time disease detection." The site scans Twitter messages (and, soon, Facebook pages) for mentions of common afflictions such as the chicken pox and the flu. Totals are posted for dozens of cities around the world, along with the original individual messages and bar graphs indexing each bug or complaint. It joins a growing group of illness-tracking sites, such as flutweet.com and google.org/flutrends.
Yesterday, Toronto ranked eighth in SickCity's list of "10 Sickest Cities." (New York was No. 1.)
The numbers are still sparse: Only nine Toronto posters had flu on their radar yesterday, for instance. But the site is poised to deliver news for more than 25 Canadian towns and cities.
And while it isn't giving the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or Health Canada a run for their money just yet, and statistics are clearly skewed, SickCity does offer hypochondriacs a dose of humour.
Toronto poster suziedingwall, for example, reported being in the 42nd hour of her flu battle: "Down to feeling sweaty all the time with persistent nagging headache. Like being a big firm lawyer all over again."
Fellow sufferer daveshumka of Vancouver is deliriously poetic: "Feelin' fluish, phlegmish, Flemish, phlegmatic, flu manchu."
In New York, LauraVogel opined: "It'd be really great if I never got food poisoning, EVER again. Tried solid food. Failed."
Social-networking possibilities abound. Perhaps these temporary shut-ins may find solace in each other, typing over cups of weak tea between frequent bathroom breaks.
