Big data can offer early insight into the spread of an epidemic like Ebola, but the key here is to stay closely attuned to the warning signs. Otherwise, important information can easily slip through the cracks – as outlined by an article in Foreign Policy called “Why big data missed the early warning signs of Ebola.”

Because while there were certainly early indicators that Ebola was catching, the issue at core was that they were all in French.

Harvard’s HealthMap tracker monitored the earliest signs of Ebola, picking up word on March 14 – “nine days before the World Health Organization formally announced the epidemic,” and issued its first alert on March 19, Foreign Policy said, adding:

As one blog put it: “So how did a computer algorithm pick up on the start of the outbreak before the WHO? As it turns out, some of the first health care workers to see Ebola in Guinea regularly blog about their work. As they began to write about treating patients with Ebola-like symptoms, a few people on social media mentioned the blog posts. And it didn’t take long for HealthMap to detect these mentions.”

This sounds like pretty powerful stuff. While it’s an impossible task for even the most avid of news sleuths to pick up every early mention of a pandemic, the computer’s role in data mining to generate warnings could provide health workers a critical head start.

But there’s a big “but” here, Foreign Policy points out: “By the time HealthMap monitored its very first report, the Guinean government had actually already announced the outbreak and notified the WHO.

The first public international warning of the impending epidemic came not from data mining or social media, but through more traditional channels: a news article in Xinhua’s French-language newswire titled “Guinée: une étrange fièvre fait 8 morts à Macenta” published late in the day (eastern standard time) on March 13.The article reports that “a disease whose nature has not yet been identified has killed 8 people in the prefecture of Macenta in south-eastern Guinea … it manifests itself as a hemorrhagic fever….”

In turn, this newswire article was actually simply reporting on a press conference held earlier in the day by Dr. Sakoba Keita, director of the Division of Disease Prevention in the Guinea Department of Health, broadcast nationally on state television, that announced both the outbreak of the unknown hemorrhagic fever and the departure of a team of government medical personnel to the area to investigate it in more detail. The Xinhua article further notes that the government of Guinea had already formally notified the WHO of the unknown outbreak.

Check out the full article here.