On OCT 20th, Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, announced that they are offering an initial $14.8 million of initial funding for partners working on genetic and digital detection, as part of their Predict and Prevent “...global public health initiative that aims to help prevent the next pandemic“.

Examples of their money at work can be viewed via Google Earth’s “PredictPrevent2008 layer“. Some examples include Healthmap, ProMED-mail’s expanded disease-tracking tools in Thailand (the former is depicted in the image above), and the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative in Cameroon (tracking diseases like avian flu).

The quote below is taken from CNET’s report on this funding, which also has a comprehensive list of the grant participants and their programs:

The holy grail is to predict disease outbreaks before they happen. For Rift Valley fever and malaria, long-term weather forecasts and deforestation maps can show us where to look for outbreaks, up to six months in advance,” Frank Rijsberman, Google.org program director, said in a statement.

While this area of detection is extremely important, there’s also the need to be able to apply all this knowledge from the research and here’s what Frank Rjisberman continue’s to say on the Google.org blog:

These grants will increase our understanding of emerging infectious diseases and generate vasts amount of data, samples, sequences, and hopefully discoveries…. Our next step in putting this new knowledge to work to save lives will be to invest in robust, affordable infectious disease diagnostics for use in Asia and Africa. We’re working to find ways Google’s data management, data sharing, and collaboration platforms can improve information access and sharing, support online bioinformatics, and develop genetic maps of infectious diseases. Finally, we’re looking to work with partners on front lines of disease emergence in hot spot countries. In short, we are very excited about the grants we announced today, but we know we have our work cut out for us – watch this space!

I really like what Google is doing in this space and look forward to seeing what comes out of the funding. If only more companies would contribute to such causes — we’ve got FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twiiter, Plaxo, Friendster, etc, etc, etc… Enough social networks, let’s start doing something valuable, like social healthcare!