It started with a text at 2 a.m. in June 2018—my friend Mark, a nurse in Chicago, asking if I’d heard about the Ebola cases popping up in Équateur Province. He’d seen a WHO alert but couldn’t find a single U.S. news outlet covering it in real time. “Why isn’t anyone tracking this *before* it’s a headline?” he wrote. I spent the next three hours digging through regional health ministry reports, WHO bulletins, and local hospital tweets. By sunrise, I’d drafted a one-page breakdown of the outbreak’s scope, transmission risks, and containment efforts. Mark forwarded it to his ER team. That was the first post on WorldHealthProblems.
Since then, the site has run on one rule: no lag between global alerts and public awareness. When the WHO flags a new cluster—whether it’s Lassa fever in Nigeria or a mysterious respiratory illness in Indonesia—we map it by region within 24 hours. No paywalls, no ads, no spin. Just raw data: case counts, travel advisories, and the unvarnished steps health agencies are (or aren’t) taking. The U.S. public deserves to know if a pathogen is crossing borders before it’s on the evening news. We’re not epidemiologists, but we *are* obsessive about vetting sources—cross-referencing ProMED-mail dispatches, local journalist reports, and peer-reviewed preprints before publishing anything.
This is a one-person operation. I’m not a doctor or a scientist; I’m a former science journalist who got tired of waiting for institutions to connect the dots. The site runs on a laptop, a stack of WHO RSS feeds, and a stubborn refusal to let outbreaks become surprises. Every update is written in raw HTML—no templates, no algorithms deciding what’s “trending.” If a new variant emerges in South Africa, you’ll read about it here before the CDC updates its travel notices. That’s the promise. There’s no team, no funding, just a commitment to speed without sacrificing accuracy. If you’ve ever Googled “should I worry about X disease” and landed on a 2019 WebMD article, you know why this matters.
WorldHealthProblems isn’t about fear—it’s about preparation. The next pandemic won’t announce itself with a press conference. It’ll start with a single case in a market, a spike in hospital admissions, or a cryptic tweet from a doctor in a language you don’t speak. We’re here to make sure you see it coming. For updates, see the Contact Us page. For the full archive, scroll down. And if you’re reading this during an outbreak: bookmark the page. You’ll want to check back tomorrow.