Cell Phones Prove Useful In Tracking Disease Outbreaks

When a cholera outbreak began months after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, health workers used cell phones to help track the movements of people leaving the epicenter, allowing them "to alert medics to go where infected people might carry the disease," according to a report published on Tuesday in PLoS Medicine, NPR's health blog "Shots" reports. "The second wave of cases did appear exactly in the areas where most of the population was moving to ... out of the cholera zone," public health specialist Richard Garfield of Columbia University said, the blog notes. Health officials also used the phones to send health advice to Haitians over voice mail or text messaging, according to the blog (Joyce, 8/31).