Methodology

Our disease outbreak dataset is the Disease Outbreak News registry curated by Dr. Juan Armando Torres-Munguía (2024), distributed on GitHub as open data. This registry contains verified outbreak events published by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Data Source

Primary source: Torres-Munguía disease outbreak news — MIT-licensed. Secondary enrichment uses the public Disease Symptom Dataset (GPL-3.0) and the 2024 Global Health & Disease Burden dataset (Apache 2.0). Country names map to ISO-3166 alpha-2 and alpha-3 codes; diseases map to ICD-10 codes.

Event Definition

One outbreak event = one DONs publication by the WHO naming a specific disease × country × year.

Classification

Each country is assigned to a WHO regional office (AFR, AMR, EMR, EUR, SEAR, WPR). Each disease is mapped to its ICD-10 chapter and most specific 4-character code available in the source data.

Update Cycle

Data is re-synced weekly from the upstream registry. See Editorial Policy for correction procedures.