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The GIDEON resource for surveys can prove invaluable for public health officials, researchers, and clinicians trying to stay ahead of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its mutants. Now, as work, school, and international travel open up once again, monitoring prevalence and seroprevalence surveys from around the world can help prevent the next pandemic.

GIDEON Informatics is a one-stop reference shop for data on infectious diseases. Users can find interactive maps of 25,000+ current and historical infectious disease outbreaks dating back to the early 1900s.

“We are delighted that GIDEON’s database, with over 2,000 pathogens and 360 diseases, is being used to jumpstart innovations that fight outbreaks and pandemics.” He added, “With globalization, emerging infectious diseases can spread worldwide in just a few days. Predictive analytics using robust underlying data could be our best defense.”

“We subscribed to GIDEON to feed our AI algorithms and help us paint a holistic picture of disease spread,” said Ajay K Gupta, HSR.health’s Co-founder and CEO. “We are always pushing the bounds of what’s capable in terms of improving health outcomes globally, and having the right source of data is instrumental to unlocking the value in our novel risk indices.”

“We strongly believe that persons with disabilities, including varying levels of visual impairment, have every right to access, learn, study, and help the world fight against infectious diseases,” stated Kristina Symes, Managing Director at GIDEON Informatics. “Over 200 publications have already used GIDEON for their research. With our new AA-level accessibility, all academic and corporate users can leverage the platform to advance the field of epidemiology.”

Over 1,800 charts have been added to the robust GIDEON epidemiology database and diagnostic toolkit. Now, researchers can download ready-to-use graphs on SARS-CoV-2 cases, cumulative cases, cumulative case rates per 100,000 persons, deaths, mortality rates, cumulative death rates by country, region, or worldwide. GIDEON also supports the creation of custom charts to compare data from one country or region versus another over time.

“Many COVID-19 patients get secondary infections that are bacterial, so I built my whole exam around it. Students were given data and had to use GIDEON to analyze the secondary infection, how it should be treated, whether it will contribute to COVID-19 resistance, so the role play continued even during the exams.”

<…> Notably, in 2017, dengue outbreaks were reported from eight Sub-Saharan countries reaching an excess of 21,000 total cases. Burkina Faso recorded more than half of these cases (13,135) including 28 deaths (Gideon, 2018).

“Here, we examine the global trends between changes in forest cover in recent decades and epidemics of human infectious diseases, using the GIDEON global database, which is the best available data set on infectious diseases that has already been used in several studies.”

“The new version of GIDEON sports a fundamentally redesigned user interface with convenient additions to responsive design and accessibility. <..> This makes GIDEON less of a reference-only resource and more of a hybrid information and diagnosis tool more immediately usable by public health practitioners. “

“While the world’s focus has been on COVID-19, sometimes it seems like nothing else is happening in infectious diseases. But that is far from the reality.

In recent years, we’ve seen Nigeria report large numbers of Lassa fever, we continue to see plague outbreaks from Africa to Asia and monkeypox cases have risen in recent decades.

Joining me to talk about these other outbreaks is Stephen A. Berger, M.D.   Dr. Berger is the co-founder of GIDEON Informatics (Global Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology Network).”

“Most viruses that cause human disease are named for the disease itself,” said Stephen Berger, a founder, and medical adviser at the Global Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology Network, in an email. “The virus that causes measles is called ‘Measles virus’ and the virus of influenza is called ‘Influenza virus.’ ”

Dr. Stephen Berger, double board-certified in infectious disease and microbiology and the founder of GIDEON, the Global Infectious Disease and Epidemiology Network, explains to Eat This, Not That! Health that he and his team have been working with a “Computer Expert [Decision Analysis] System” designed to generate a list of diseases based on signs and symptoms. The list is ranked according to statistical probability.