An artificial intelligence tool out of Boston University aims to enhance surveillance of disease outbreaks across the globe, a task traditionally informed by several federal agencies that have been dismantled or cut back in the second Trump administration.
The project known as the Biothreats Emergence, Analysis and Communications Network, or BEACON, took more than a year to develop. It launched in April, as the Trump administration slashed the workforce and budget at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, all but eliminated the U.S. Agency for International Development and cut ties to the World Health Organization.
BEACON uses AI and human expertise to track emerging diseases in the U.S. and abroad. The project’s founder, Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, said BEACON alerts health officials and members of the public about potential threats, so they can take action.
“Our main goal is to reduce the time between the reporting of a disease and its response,” said Bhadelia, an infectious disease physician who served in the Biden administration’s COVID response team. “You want a potential alarm bell.”
In the first three months, Bhadelia said BEACON has posted alerts about 420 outbreaks and mapped 134 different disease causing organisms in humans and other species. The website has active users in 162 countries, ranging from individuals to local, state and national health departments, the World Health Organization and the international organization of police, INTERPOL.
“One of the biggest surprises for us is that we’ve met people’s trust barometer already,” said Bhadelia, who also directs BU’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases.
The tool provides updates in a social media-style scroll. On a recent day it included reports about the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the death toll from West Nile Virus in Italy, increasing cases of mpox in Thailand, and a proposal to declare that Chagas, already common in Mexico, is immediately endemic — or occurring regularly — in the southern U.S. Chagas is transmitted by an insect known as the “kissing bug” and can lead to dangerous heart and gastrointestinal problems.
There are other online surveillance websites in the U.S. and around the world that use AI, specifically large language models, to collect and analyze potential biothreats and disease outbreaks. Bhadelia said BEACON is unique because it is free, open to all and written for a general audience, as opposed to medical and biosecurity experts.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said the CDC monitors biothreats and described a pathogen surveillance project, the Biothreat Radar Detection System. He called it “an advanced early-detection tool” designed to “prevent catastrophe.”
A spokeswoman for Kennedy said in an email that this new system is built on disease surveillance developed during the COVID-19 pandemic and will expand the CDC’s existing detection programs. It will use AI and algorithms to screen groups of people, not individuals, to automate national public health warnings. A budget summary requests $52 million for the proposal.
BEACON was built with $3 million in grants from government agencies and private foundations, in partnership with BU’s Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science and Engineering and HealthMap, a disease alert website at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Kennedy said the enhanced federal detection system and other changes at the agency would “restore the CDC’s focus on infectious disease” and “rebuild trust.” But many public health leaders are skeptical because a number of senior staff have recently left the CDC, saying Kennedy is not making decisions based on science and evidence.
More broadly, Bhadelia and others said the Trump administration has undermined efforts to detect emerging threats by withdrawing from the World Health Organization and dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which had disease surveillance partners on the ground in dozens of countries.
“It truly is not a hyperbole to say public health is under attack,” said Bhadelia. “The current environment is setting up vulnerabilities for the American population.”
BEACON uses AI to scrape data for its reports from the web, which generates about half of the information for the tool. Other information is provided by a group of infectious disease and public health experts in 12 countries covering most of the continents as well as from anyone who submits a case that can be verified.
Bhadelia said reporting from all sources is evaluated by a medical or public health professional before it is posted. Updates are only available in English for immediately, but Bhadelia said she expects translations into seven other languages by early next year.
Some of BEACON’s reports, like those on measles in the U.S. or Salmonella, rely on data collected by the CDC. Bhadelia said BEACON will not try to replicate local investigations the CDC has traditionally conducted to determine the cause and extent of an outbreak.
BEACON is one of several projects emerging to replace some of what public health experts said is being lost under the Trump administration. The Vaccine Integrity Project collects research and evaluations of vaccines, aiming to counter misinformation. The Pandemic Center at Brown University sends out a weekly infectious disease tracking report.
Many public health experts said because the U.S. government is ceding leadership on disease surveillance, guidance and response planning, private projects are serving as a back-up.
“Independent and academic organizations are the next best thing we can have,” said Dr. Atul Gawande, the former head of Global Health at USAID. “It isn’t a replacement. There’s no way it could do what the U.S. government was capable of doing before. But, this is where we are.”
Jennifer Nuzzo, who directs the Pandemic Center at Brown, said she’s worried the public will see projects like BEACON or others and assume the CDC is no longer needed, or that there’s no reason to reinvest in global health tracking that has helped prevent outbreaks in the U.S.
“The protection of public health is inherently a government responsibility,” said Nuzzo. And, it’s a deterrent against disease outbreaks and biological attacks.
“We have basically said the U.S. is not interested in preparing and not interested in defending itself,” Nuzzo said.
Editor’s Note: Boston University owns WBUR’s broadcast license. WBUR is editorially independent.
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