Can an app prevent the next pandemic disease?
From smallpox to influenza, pandemic diseases throughout history have spread quickly, causing devastation to entire populations.
In the hopes of preventing another pandemic disease from hitting, BBC Four has created a new app that tracks where users travel and interact. The data collected will be used to simulate how a pandemic might spread - and to determine what could be done to stop it. THE PANDEMIC APP The app tracks your approximate movements at regular intervals over a single 24 hour period.
But for security reasons, the app will never know exactly where or who you are.
It will also ask a few questions about your journeys and the people you spend time with to help researchers work out how a real flu pandemic might spread across the UK.
The more people of all ages that take part in BBC Pandemic, the better that data will be, according to the researchers.
By identifying the human networks and behaviours that spread a deadly flu, BBC Pandemic will help to make these models more accurate and, in turn, help to stem the next pandemic.
From today, people in the UK can download the free app, called BBC Pandemic, via the App Store or Google Play.
If you live in Haslemere, Surrey, there’s also a ‘Haslemere Outbreak’ option built especially for your area.
The app tracks your approximate movements at regular intervals over a single 24 hour period, but for security reasons will never know exactly where or who you are.
In a post on its website, a spokesperson for the BBC said: ‘There are flu outbreaks every year but in the last 100 years, there have been four pandemics of a particularly deadly flu, including the Spanish Influenza outbreak which hit in 1918, killing up to 100 million people worldwide.