As towns lose their newspapers, disease detectives are left to fly blind
▻https://www.statnews.com/2018/03/20/news-deserts-infectious-disease
Epidemiologists rely on all kinds of data to detect the spread of disease, including reports from local and state agencies and social media. But local newspapers are critical to identifying outbreaks and forecasting their trajectories.
On the map, Majumder saw every county without a local newspaper as a community where health officials and disease researchers could be flying blind.
“We rely very heavily on local news. And I think what this will probably mean is that there are going to be pockets of the U.S. where we’re just not going to have a particularly good signal anymore,” said Majumder, a Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Majumder is a computational epidemiology research fellow at HealthMap, a 12-year-old disease detection project run by researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital. The website uses nontraditional data sources — reports from local news outlets and social media platforms among them— to track global infectious disease activity in real time.