CloseClinical aims to provide a community environment for academics and professionals interested in health and clinical research informatics.

The map and the data behind it are compiled by Dr. Henry Niman, a biomedical researcher in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, using technology provided by Rhiza Labs and Google. The map is compiled using data from official sources, news reports and user-contributions and updated multiple times per day.

Rhiza's web-based mapping product, Insight, is helping Dr. Niman get official and unofficial data into the tracking system faster while giving researchers and the public many options for viewing the data in a useful and understandable way.

Cartography of clinical and epidemiological data is very useful in providing information about the ways a disease spreads world wide. In this project, the cargtographies are provided by NASA as one can read on the bottom of the maps.

Before Flu Trakcer becomes available, another automatically generated Google Map was available here. It was claimed to be entirely based on the Google's sophisticated search algorithms, which were astonishingly compatible with real world reports of the Swine flu virus A/H1N1. The map made a buz on the Internet, and a number of panic attacks all over the world!

The Flu Tracker website:  http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com/