Two Pennsylvania universities announced yesterday that they would provide health professionals with new software free of charge to track suspicious disease outbreaks.

The Real-time Outbreak Disease Surveillance (RODS) software — developed by the BioMedical Security Institute, which is jointly operated by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh — is now available online.  Health care workers may enter patients’ symptoms, their ZIP codes and the dates of their visits into the program, which can then alert medical and emergency response officials to any suspicious spikes in symptoms.

The program is currently in use at about half of the healthcare organizations in the Pittsburgh area, said Michael Wagner, co-director of the institute.  The system was also used at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah (see GSN, May 20).

The institute is also working to develop a program to monitor pharmaceutical sales, which also could indicate a biological weapons attack (Dan Nephin, Associated Press, Dec. 3).

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