Can Google, with its big data, map and zap the spread of Zika?

Google software engineers John Li and Zora Tung with UNICEF research scientist Manuel Garcia Herranz and UX designer Tanya Bhandari working on the open source data platform. (credit: Google)

A vaccine would be a priceless weapon in the fight against Zika, a virus currently tearing through the Western Hemisphere and linked to devastating birth defects and paralyzing neurological conditions. But a vaccine wouldn’t be everything, of course. If the frustrating wars against measles and polio have proven anything, it’s that eradicating an infectious disease requires relentless public health outreach, surveillance, and containment, as well as medical advances. Indeed, the one and only eradication of an infectious disease of humans—smallpox—was accomplished not just with a vaccine, but tight networks for disease monitoring and strategic vaccination campaigns around disease hotspots—in other words, spatial data and responses.

While Zika is very different from smallpox and scientists are likely to be years away from having a vaccine, the importance of spatial data in stamping out a scourge are the same. And, when it comes to mapping Zika, Google thinks it’s uniquely suited for the task.

Thursday, the tech giant announced that it has assembled a team of volunteer engineers, designers, and data scientists that will use weather, travel, and disease data to map and forecast the spread of the virus. Google hopes that the resulting open source modeling will help governments and public health organizations monitor and anticipate outbreaks in real time so that they can direct resources and responses accordingly.