PORTSMOUTH, N.H. (AP) – A Portsmouth company is helping track the bird flu around the world.
With technology developed by Global Relief Technologies, officials tracking the flu will use PDAs, or hand-held computers, to record and report information about patients and conditions.
The data is sent by satellite to the company headquarters and quickly analyzed.
The Defense Department awarded the company a $3.5 million contract to provide about 120 PDAs to Marine Corps field crews working in Southeast Asia. Teams collect information on the flu, such as the number of birds found dead and where the flu had spread in humans.
Company CEO Michael Gray says the objective is to identify what’s going on more quickly and more accurately.
Information from teams now can be analyzed in hours with programs developed by the company, allowing officials to generate charts and maps to show who is being affected by the flu, where the flu is located and where and how quickly it is spreading.
He said before the partnership, field crews collected information with pencil and paper, then called in results by phone, which delayed the analysis.
“This method took so long that the situation was changing faster than the data could be analyzed,” Gray said.
Gray, who was involved in rapid village assessment in the Balkans, was frustrated at how information on paper sometimes sat for months in boxes without being analyzed.
He also served as a liaison between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department for humanitarian assistance planning in Afghanistan.
“A lot of data is not very valuable unless there’s some type of analysis done,” he said.
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