Did you know that a gastrointestinal illness believed to be norovirus broke out at Portsmouth Regional Hospital in late January affecting at least nine patients and 22 staff members? Well, it turns out you can find out about all sorts of disease outbreaks around the planet on a very cool website named HEALTHmap.

HEALTHmap, which is produced by the Children's Hospital Informatics Program (Boston) and the Harvard- MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology, shows you where more than 50 diseases have been reported around the world. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. In addition, HEALTHmap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers.

Here are the websites where HEALTHmap gets its news:

• ProMED Mail: Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases.
• World Health Organization: The United Nations specialized agency for health.
• EuroSurveillance: Peer-reviewed European information on communicable disease surveillance and control.
• Google News: A commercial news aggregation service provided by Google.

And don't forget to explore the library's Health and Medicine databases and recommended websites page in iBrowse!