Public health events and open source software

As a quick follow up to the last post on Ebola and the one before that on open source software and computing, a great example of the intersection of public health, computing, and free analytic software has recently been published. In his Ecologically Oriented blog, Jim Bouldin has written about some of the statistics of the West African Ebola outbreak from its inception. In the piece he posts R code for scraping and analyzing up-to-date WHO data on cases and deaths in Africa. The post illustrates how data can be acquired and analyzed using robust open source software and how results -- including the code used to generate them -- can be promulgated rapidly. Bravo!