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
We partnered with SPC to modernise its disease tracking and alert system. We set up real time monitoring of the websites and social media channels selected by SPC, using disease keywords defined by its team. The watch list covers 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 run the system together with SPC’s analysts, who monitor emerging diseases themselves and work directly in the platform. We have also piloted the automated extraction of the weekly bulletins of the Pacific Public Health Surveillance Network, with integration planned for 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, so its teams can give more attention to designing timely public health interventions. The work is ongoing.