Although government reporting of notifiable disease data is widespread, most countries do not report in a machine-readable format. This is despite the World Health Organization's (WHO's) International Health Regulations stating, "[e]ach State Party shall notify WHO by the most efficient means of communication available." [1] Instead, data are often in the form of files that contain text, tables, and graphs summarizing weekly or monthly case counts. This presents a problem when information is needed for data-intensive approaches to epidemiology, biosurveillance, and public health. Epi Archive solves this by continuously collecting notifiable disease data while making it uniform and readily accessible.
Epi Archive: (1) collects data by scraping multiple public health websites, (2) processes these disparate data into a common form, and (3) serves it to users via a web interface and RESTful API. Epi Archive is funded by the Chemical and Biological Technologies Department (J9CB) within the Defense Threat Reduction Agency of the Department of Defense. It is maintained by Los Alamos National Laboratory. The primary authors for Epi Archive are Hari Khalsa and Sergio Cordova, with additional contributions from Byron Tasseff, Prabhu Khalsa, and Nicholas Generous. Please feel free to contact the team with any suggestions, questions, or concerns.