Users can also submit an outbreak report. This will enable individuals in cities and countries worldwide to interact with the HealthMap team and participate in the public health surveillance process.

Users may take photos - of situations and scenarios of, and/or leading to, disease - with their iPhone and submit them to the HealthMap system for review and eventual posting as an alert on the worldwide map.

'This is grassroots, participatory epidemiology,' says HealthMap co-founder Clark Freifeld, a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab and research software developer at CHIP,' according to a Children's Hospital release.

HealthMap was founded in 2006 and mines the Internet - searching disparate data sources such as news reports, curated personal accounts, official alerts, blogs and chat rooms - to track and map infectious disease outbreaks.