1. Context and challenge

The Pacific Community (SPC) monitors emerging diseases and issues alerts across the Pacific region. Its system relied heavily on manual work, from scanning news and social media to coordinating with individual countries and transcribing weekly surveillance bulletins. As a result, alerts were often delayed, and staff spent more time collecting data than acting on it. Poor connectivity in many Pacific Island countries and territories made these delays worse.

2. Our role

Research for Purpose partnered with SPC to modernise its disease tracking and alert system. We are responsible for the monitoring set-up and the alert system that allows SPC to run the system on its own.

3. What we did

We deployed real-time monitoring of the websites and social media channels SPC selected, searching for disease keywords defined by SPC. The watch list covered 17 diseases, including HIV, dengue, COVID-19, measles, mpox, cholera, leptospirosis and Oropouche. On this data we built an alert system that identifies potential health threats in the Pacific and worldwide.

We also piloted automated extraction from the weekly bulletins of the Pacific Public Health Surveillance Network and aim to integrate in 2027.

4. Results

Over twelve months, the system analysed 7,207 social media posts and 32,121 web publications. SPC now receives alerts faster and processes data in far less time. Its teams can put more effort into designing timely public health interventions.