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Veratect's tracking method includes analyzing Internet data (blogs and other sources), maintaining on-the-ground contact with health officials, text-mining news reports and government resources for keywords related to infectious-disease outbreaks and using satellite images of weather patterns to detect and predict the progress of global events like disease and civil unrest. Veratect sources first picked up reports of human respiratory disease at a pig farm in Mexico on April 6; additional reports of a similar illness surfaced on April 16, which is when the company got concerned enough to e-mail officials...
...going on the Web finding information on flu to predict where flu is taking place?" asks Dr. Richard Besser, acting head of the CDC. "Looking back, it is helpful. The question is, Looking forward, can you see that? We are open, and continually looking at various approaches for early detection. The sooner we detect a problem, the sooner we can detect and implement protective measures...
...start to spread more quickly, then Google's system may be able to keep pace with it and alert health officials immediately as the problem grows. "If the disease starts spreading in a particular area, for example, and affects thousands of people, then we hope that our system would detect that within 24 hours," says Ginsberg. The idea would be to catch the rise in cases before too many people get sick. And that's what the company is hoping it can do in Mexico: give health officials there a sense of where the cases are, and if the outbreak...
...becoming a growing problem. Since 2001, more than 100 tunnels have been discovered by U.S. law enforcement, compared with just 15 in the 1990s, and the pace is accelerating. Most of those have been uncovered through human intelligence, since there are no currently available technical means to reliably detect tunnels. The Department of Homeland Security started spending research money on detection technologies two years ago. But even the most promising ones - primarily adapted from mining and petroleum exploration industries - are several years from proving reliable. "We see this as one of those frontier threat areas that have to be mitigated...
...Back at the Mexico-Texas border, the new fence does include some underground sensors. But in reality, it basically stitches together currently available commercial technology which experts acknowledge is far from adequate to detect stealth tunneling. The overall problem is that soil conditions vary widely and some environments pose particular challenges. Acoustical and electromagnetic techniques, for instance, are seriously compromised in urban environments, which are noisy and have lots of other metal around. That's important because most tunnels so far have been found in or near cities, which provide the "cover" to help obscure the infrastructure needed, like warehouses...