One of the worst problems of living in a society facing outbreaks of disease — aside from being infected, that is — is not knowing what's going on.
For a while, at least, medical officers made daily statements to the press about the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome [SARS] outbreak, but the media report only the individual announcements and not repeat the cumulative information offered. What the public needs is data.
Two Canadian companies are rushing in to fill that void with high-tech responses: Ottawa-based Databeacon has posted numbers concerning both SARS and West Nile virus using its ingenious data-display engine, and Calgary's Carmina Technologies is installing a real-time database on SARS at the University of Guelph.
Between the two, fearful people can get a better picture — and perhaps a little comfort — from the numbers.
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Databeacon has created a sophisticated Java-based tool that presents a mountain of data in a multiple of ways. It demonstrates what the tool can do at its website, www.storydata.com. It has just posted 2002 figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Health Canada about West Nile; visitors can click away to their hearts' content on the statistics that are displayed.
They can discover, for instance, that 4,156 positive cases of human infection with West Nile have been reported in the United States, with only 325 in Canada. In the United States, the death rate last year was 6.4 per cent, and in Canada 5.2 per cent.
The presentation is interactive, and can be displayed in bar graphs, pie charts or spreadsheet-like cells. The numbers can also be displayed by top-10 infected areas and by the number of deaths. Users can expand and collapse data, apply rules to highlight data, and drag-and-drop data categories onto the charts and have them display data in a variety of ways.
It does take a little understanding of how statistics work, admits Databeacon CEO Andy Coutts, but patient playing with the program can be rewarding.
"Most information is not very useful," he told Globetechnology.com. "Data analysis is an arcane discipline. We've democratized it."
To demonstrate that, Mr. Coutts posted a classic Internet chestnut — how fast Santa Claus' sleigh would have to go to reach all the children in the world in one night, and how much weight in toys it would have to carry — and allowed visitors at Storydata.com to compare the results to a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, a Saturn 5 rocket and a Boeing 747, among others.
(The sleigh travels at 7.2 million miles per hour; the pokey Saturn 5 at 25,000 mph.)
Other data went up. Among them is the Axis of Evil (world terrorist attacks), Canadian venture capital spending, a global sex survey, the costs of a bioterrorist attack and the "Mommy shift" (birth statistics).
Though each new addition — Mr. Coutts calls them "data slices" — to the website causes a spike in the site's traffic, the one that is consistently the most popular is automobile gas mileage, followed by terrorist statistics.
A chart on the SARS outbreak has also recently been added; data about the outbreak is scarce and hard to get, but Databeacon shows a graph, using World Health Organization figures covering March to June, with the news that the total number of cases has levelled off, the number of deaths is barely rising and the number of recovered cases is climbing steeply.
Put this way, the SARS picture becomes more comforting.
While the purpose of Storydata.com is to demonstrate a product Databeacon wishes to sell (from $5,000 to $100,000, varying with the licensing process), Carmina Technologies Inc. has created a protocol called ASSUR H&S (health and safety), designed to help the University of Guelph check students for SARS when they return to classes in the fall.
The university will be screening its 16,000 students before they enter the campus' health centre to prevent precisely the kind of hospital-based outbreaks experienced in Toronto.
Students are asked to complete forms and describe medical symptoms. The resulting database, updated in real time, will provide immeasurable help to the university should an outbreak happen there.
Carmina's SARS protocol is the second ASSUR H&S implementation; Ontario health units adopted the first to monitor larvae infestations as they track the West Nile virus.
"The days of health inspectors using clipboards and pens has passed," a company spokesman said. "No longer will there be a lag time from when the data is collected to when it is added to the formal report."