Warning system for infectious diseases

Scope

How to develop a travel information system to prevent the spreading of an infectious disease such as swine influenza?

Definition

The current system is to inform a whole nation when one case of swine influenza is detected in a single flight. Then the passengers of that flight can take safety measures and avoid contacts with other people for a few days to avoid the spreading of the infection. However, this is extremely inefficient, as only 0.001 % of the audience is the actual target group. In all others, the information only causes anxiety and thus has negative benefit.

Result

Let's assume an information system where all passengers write down their travel information, i.e. the flights, trains, buses, and all other public transportation modes where people can get in contact with infected passengers. The information is given at the precision of a single vehicle and the exact time (e.g. from which to which bus stop in a certain bus line at what time).

When a person is detected to have the infection, all his trips can be retrieved from the system, and all his fellow passengers can be identified and notified immediately. This way it is possible to send target information to the small population actually at risk.

This has a potential privacy problem, because there must be enough information to reach the passengers. However, this can be avoided by not asking any personal information in the system, only a passenger identifier that is not linked to any personal information but is known to the passenger. Therefore, the passenger is able to log in the system himself to see whether there are any disease warnings to him.

As we can see, the critical things in the system are that the passenger must be willing to write down all his trip information in the system, and check regularly for personal warnings. How can we motivate people to do this? It must cover the majority of the population to be at all effective.

The solutions is to offer some utility to the passengers. An obvious utility becomes available if the travel information is collected before the passenger makes his choice about the details of his travel. Then, the system can be utilised as the trip aggregation system of composite traffic and actually provide the transportation to the passenger. This makes a high incentive to the passenger to both give his travel information to the system, and also to check his account in the system regularly, as he is very likely to make new trips frequently.

In addition, if someone is planning to develop an open web reporting system for infectious diseases, it should be done in connection with the composite traffic system.