System to provide health authorities with real-time knowledge about disease outbreaks or industrial accidents
The European Commission (EC) has developed a medical intelligence system to provide health authorities with real-time knowledge about disease outbreaks or industrial accidents.
The EC hopes the system, called MediSys, will help authorities to identify incidents as early as possible and react in a timely way.
The Commission said that it also hopes that MediSys will help authorities tackling a major incident such as a biological terrorist attack.
Using pre-defined keywords and combinations, MediSys crawls through the web and sorts information. In the recent case of the outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the UK, the Commission said MediSys detected a sudden jump in news reports and automatically sent email and SMS alerts to public health officials across Europe.
The system collects and sorts information from more than 1000 news and 120 public health websites in 32 languages.
Citizens can also have free access to the automatic information scanning tool.
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