About Outbreak Watch
What this site is
Outbreak Watch is a public dashboard that aggregates information about ongoing disease outbreaks from official public health sources. It is built for the general public — not specialists — so every number comes with a plain-language explanation of what it means.
What this site is not
- Not a medical advice service. Talk to your doctor for medical decisions.
- Not an official government source. We summarize and link to those sources.
- Not real-time in the strictest sense — data refreshes every six hours.
- Not a predictive model. We don't forecast where outbreaks are going.
Methodology
We fetch updates every six hours from the WHO Disease Outbreak News RSS feed, the CDC outbreaks page, and the ECDC feed. We match items across sources, attach links so every data point can be traced back to its origin, and surface conflicts transparently when sources disagree.
The alert level for each outbreak is calculated from a fixed set of public criteria — countries affected, untraced cases, doubling time, healthcare-worker exposure, and whether a formal warning has been issued. The exact rules are open and the same for every outbreak.
Data sources
Limitations and honest caveats
- Many of the structured indicators (doubling time, untraced cases, severity breakdown) come from curated data and cannot always be extracted directly from RSS feeds. We flag data confidence on every card.
- Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than hiding it. We do not arbitrate between the WHO and a national health body.
- Reported case counts can lag real infections by days or weeks, especially in under-tested regions. We always show a data confidence indicator.
Feedback
Found an issue, an inaccurate number, or a clearer way to phrase something? We'd love to hear it. Open an issue on the project repository or reach out via the contact details there.