New System Aims to Notify People of Disease Outbreaks From Environment and Health Concerns

Increasing concerns regarding the environment have taken a toll on human health. Epidemics can occur at any moment, which has prompted health officials to develop a system to forecast such happenings. The European Union's EO2HEAVEN project may be a formidable solution.

With healthcare costs on the rise and erratic climate conditions, the EO2HEAVEN project has been developed in hopes of predicting and identifying where a disease outbreak may occur. The project's website, eo2heaven.org, has all of the latest information. The Earth Observation and Environmental Modelling for the Mitigation of Health Risks (EO2HEAVEN) was started on Feb. 1, 2010 in hopes to "contribute to a better understanding of complex relationships between environmental changes and their impact on human health."

For example, the project's health officials have specifically looked at Cholera. The disease has been wiped out for the most part, but it's still an issue in Africa where thousands of lives are lost annually. As a result, scientists have implemented the use of sensors to measure rainfall, exposure to solar radiation and pH value, as well as temperature and concentration of nutrients in the water. The software allows officials to document the location and prevalence for cases of Cholera. This has been an important development in determining where a disease outbreak may occur next. More information can be found in this Fraunhofer press release.

The studies in Africa, specifically South Africa and Uganda, have allowed the EO2HEAVEN project to succeed in fulfilling their objectives. As enumerated on the project's website, their objectives are to:

• "Contribute to a better understanding of the complex relationships between environmental changes and their impact on human health."
• "Develop a software platform for scientists to find, access, process and explore environmental and health data, as well as for decision makers to visualize summarized information."
• "To further study health data collections and develop models to relate environmental data with exposure and health data."

The last EO2HEAVEN Conference Day was in Belgium this past May. The conference's next meeting has not yet been scheduled, but more information can be found on the EO2HEAVEN website.