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A team of Canadian researchers are working with the British authorities to track online chatter and anticipate the likelihood of an infectious disease outbreak in the run up to the London Olympics, according to a research paper published in the latest issue of The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

The team, who are led by Dr Kamran Khan, an infectious disease physician at St Michael's Hospital in Toronto, are using a special tracking system which uses two state-of-the-art technologies. The first, HealthMap.org, which was developed by John Brownstein, assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard University and a co-author, tracks potential outbreaks in real time through constantly monitoring the web to see what people are talking about. The information will be filtered using the Bio Dispora system, created by Dr Khan, which uses air traffic patterns to predict the spread of infectious disease.

In an interview with Canada's National Post, Dr Khan said: 'Mass gatherings are a phenomenon that are not really that understood. You have global population that are converging in a single point, and then when the gathering is over, those individuals are diverging and going back to the places that they come from.'

Historically, host countries tend to focus attention on the gathering when it is happening which means that, in the event of infectious disease outbreak, they are responding rather than proactively working to prevent the occurence. The researchers will look 'at social media trends and Twitter' to spot 'early signals of what types of infectious disease threats might be out there', said Dr Khan. While government bodies and health authorities also work to track epidemics, their reports - though accurate - take time, and often come too late to be used in disease prevention.

'We usually start to focus our attention in the two weeks or so before a mass gathering and start really honing in on what types of disease outbreaks would be happening around the world.' This will allow British health officials to anticipate outbreaks and consider their response, notify authorities and determine treatment plans. Dr Khan said they would be able to notify hospitals that 'there's a possibility someone with these symptoms and this type of disease may walk into your emergency room'.

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