A public health application of data analysis for homeland security

This presentation follows up the talk last year to WINFORMS (The Washington Institute for Operations Research and The Management Sciences) in which an approach developed for the analysis of military command and control during crises was shown to be relevant to surveillance for an infectious disease outbreak. ProMEDMail is an Internet-based system dedicated to rapid global dis semination of information on outbreaks of infectious diseases and acute exposures to toxins that affect human health. The presentation will demonstrate how the collection, formatting, and analysis of raw data, using ProMED-Mail, can point to emerging biological incidents and allow the real-time dissemination of results to local, regional, and central health facilities.