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Google Query Reveals Federal Health Surveillance
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-09-07
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
An off-the-cuff search on Google revealed all kinds of interesting goodies, including a case study showing how routine public health surveillance to determine if a disease outbreak may be taking place.
 | | Google Query Reveals Federal Health Surveillance |  |
Boing Boing's Mark Fraunfelder wrote in a recent post to the popular blog that there are times when someone named Bill likes to feed interesting searches to Google, just to see what comes back. Bill's latest query proved a real winner:
Google this: Confidential "do not distribute."
I just can't believe in this day and age that anyone would think, "let's keep it confidential, but put on our website." I found some VERY interesting info I probably wasn't supposed to see.
We don't know what Bill considered very interesting, but here is a March 2005 case study performed at the University of Pittsburgh that might fit the bill. The Real-time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance (RODS) System and the National Retail Data Monitor case studies have a fascinating list of supporters:
"RODS System and NRDM development supported by Pennsylvania Bioinformatics grant ME-01-737, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, Department of Homeland Security, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, National Library of Medicine, state departments of health in Indiana, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Utah, Washington State, and the Passaic Valley Water Commission."
When sales of certain over-the-counter medications increase beyond a proposed 'wavelet algorithm' forecast, a map plot of zip codes will change in color to orange or red to designate a potential problem area. From the "Confidential - 'do not distribute'" PowerPoint slides:
Only six OTC categories are available for prospective analysis (anti-diarrheal, anti-fever pediatric (APP), cough syrup pediatric liquid (CSPL), cough/cold, electrolytes, and thermometers) because the wavelet algorithm runs on only six categories prospectively.
The 11-slide presentation is incomplete, as only the executive summary and the prospective study methods have been filled out with some information. One of the bullet points in the executive summary does read "routine public health surveillance."
If the retail data is updated frequently, the government could use this information to determine if an area has been exposed to some kind of biological attack. The more paranoid observer could interpret this as a way the government could track the effects of its own secret tests of a biological weapon.
Plenty of other results spill forth from Google with this query. On the first page of search results, Microsoft Research has one of its SIGGRAPH 2006 presentations turning up in the search. Keep in mind Microsoft's renewed 'focus' on PC security.
Wireless gadget maker Ambient Devices has a detailed schematic for one of its products available through this search. Datacast Module v3.1 probably won't be of much use to the typical layman, but plenty of hardware geeks surf the Internet and the diagram could prove instructive.
UPDATES! - I heard from Bill Linn, the Bill in question from the original Boing Boing post; he was the one who pointed out the query to Mark Frauenfelder. I asked Bill if I could credit him and he said yes, pointing out with a smile that he had "nothing confidential to hide."
Ambient co-founder and VP Technology Ben Resner also emailed about the story. It turns out that the schematic in question was supposed to lose the "Confidential - do not distribute" label. They want the schematic to be seen by others. He's updated the schematic to indicate this, so enjoy.
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Tags: Google, Health, Surveillance, Department of Homeland Security
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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