An artificial intelligence tool out of Boston University aims to enhance surveillance of disease outbreaks across the globe, a task traditionally informed by several federal agencies that have been dismantled or cut back in the second Trump administration.<\/p>\n
The project known as the Biothreats Emergence, Analysis and Communications Network, or BEACON<\/a>, took more than a year to develop. It launched in April, as the Trump administration slashed the workforce and budget<\/a> at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, all but eliminated the U.S. Agency for International Development<\/a> and cut ties<\/a> to the World Health Organization.<\/p>\n BEACON uses AI and human expertise to track emerging diseases in the U.S. and abroad. The project\u2019s founder, Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, said BEACON alerts health officials and members of the public about potential threats, so they can take action.<\/p>\n \u201cOur main goal is to reduce the time between the reporting of a disease and its response,\u201d said Bhadelia, an infectious disease physician who served in the Biden administration\u2019s COVID response team. \u201cYou want a potential alarm bell.\u201d<\/p>\n In the first three months, Bhadelia said BEACON has posted alerts about 420 outbreaks and mapped 134 different disease causing organisms in humans and other species. The website has active users in 162 countries, ranging from individuals to local, state and national health departments, the World Health Organization and the International Criminal Police Organization, known as INTERPOL.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the biggest surprises for us is that we\u2019ve met people\u2019s trust barometer already,\u201d said Bhadelia, who also directs BU\u2019s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases.<\/p>\n The tool provides updates in a social media-style scroll. On a recent day it included reports about an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the death toll from West Nile Virus in Italy, increasing cases of mpox in Thailand, and a proposal to declare that Chagas, already common in Mexico, is now endemic \u2014 or occurring regularly \u2014 in the southern U.S. Chagas is transmitted by an insect known as the \u201ckissing bug<\/a>\u201d and can lead to dangerous heart and gastrointestinal problems.<\/p>\n There are other online surveillance websites in the U.S. and around the world that use AI, specifically large language models, to collect and analyze potential biothreats and disease outbreaks. Bhadelia said BEACON is unique because it is free, open to all and written for a general audience, as opposed to medical and biosecurity experts.<\/p>\n In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week<\/a>, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said the CDC monitors biothreats and described a pathogen surveillance project, the Biothreat Radar Detection System. He called it \u201can advanced early-detection tool\u201d designed to \u201cprevent catastrophe.”<\/p>\n A spokeswoman for Kennedy said in an email that this new system is built on disease surveillance developed during the COVID-19 pandemic and will expand the CDC\u2019s existing detection programs. It will use AI and algorithms to screen groups of people, not individuals, to automate national public health warnings. A budget summary<\/a> requests $52 million for the proposal.<\/p>\n BEACON was built with $3 million in grants from government agencies and private foundations, in partnership with BU\u2019s Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science and Engineering and HealthMap<\/a>, a disease alert website at Boston Children\u2019s Hospital.<\/p>\n Kennedy said the enhanced federal detection system and other changes at the agency would \u201crestore the CDC\u2019s focus on infectious disease\u201d and \u201crebuild trust.\u201d But many public health leaders are skeptical because a number of senior staff have recently left the CDC, saying Kennedy is not making decisions based on science<\/a> and evidence.<\/p>\n More broadly, Bhadelia and others said the Trump administration has undermined efforts to detect emerging threats by withdrawing from the World Health Organization and dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which had disease surveillance partners on the ground in dozens of countries.<\/p>\n \u201cIt truly is not a hyperbole to say public health is under attack,\u201d said Bhadelia. \u201cThe current environment is setting up vulnerabilities for the American population.\u201d<\/p>\n BEACON uses AI to scrape data for its reports from the web, which generates about half of the information for the tool. Other information is provided by a group of infectious disease and public health experts in 12 countries covering most of the continents, as well as from anyone who submits a case that can be verified.<\/p>\n Bhadelia said reporting from all sources is evaluated by a medical or public health professional before it is posted. Updates are only available in English for now, but Bhadelia said she expects translations into seven other languages by early next year.<\/p>\n Some of BEACON\u2019s reports, like those on measles in the U.S. or Salmonella, rely on data collected by the CDC. Bhadelia said BEACON will not try to replicate local investigations the CDC has traditionally conducted to determine the cause and extent of an outbreak.<\/p>\n BEACON is one of several projects emerging to replace some of what public health experts said is being lost under the Trump administration. The University of Minnesota’s Vaccine Integrity Project<\/a> collects research and evaluations of vaccines, aiming to counter misinformation. The Pandemic Center at Brown University sends out a weekly infectious disease tracking report<\/a>.<\/p>\n Many public health experts said because the U.S. government is ceding leadership on disease surveillance, guidance and response planning, private projects are serving as a back-up.<\/p>\n \u201cIndependent and academic organizations are the next best thing we can have,\u201d said Dr. Atul Gawande, the former head of Global Health at USAID. \u201cIt isn\u2019t a replacement. There\u2019s no way it could do what the U.S. government was capable of doing before. But, this is where we are.\u201d<\/p>\n Jennifer Nuzzo, who directs the Pandemic Center at Brown, said she\u2019s worried the public will see projects like BEACON or others and assume the CDC is no longer needed, or that there\u2019s no reason to reinvest in global health tracking that has helped prevent outbreaks in the U.S.<\/p>\n \u201cThe protection of public health is inherently a government responsibility,\u201d said Nuzzo. And, it\u2019s a deterrent against disease outbreaks and biological attacks.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have basically said the U.S. is not interested in preparing and not interested in defending itself,\u201d Nuzzo said.<\/p>\n Editor’s Note: Boston University owns WBUR’s broadcast license. WBUR is editorially independent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An artificial intelligence tool out of Boston University aims to enhance surveillance of disease outbreaks across the globe,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":151459,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-151458","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151458\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}