Source standards
We prioritize public health authorities for official case definitions, counts, and statements. Media coverage can document a developing report but is labelled separately. Official statements are attributed to the issuing authority; they are not presented as independent laboratory verification by this project.
Automated collection finds candidate links from configured sources. Publication requires an editorial review. A source link, useful summary, original source date, and appropriate location context are required. We do not reproduce full third-party news articles.
What the status labels mean
- Confirmed: the cited source explicitly establishes a confirmed human plague event.
- Suspected: the cited source explicitly describes suspected plague without confirmation.
- Unconfirmed: a plague-related claim remains unverified or disputed in the reporting.
- Resolved: follow-up evidence explicitly clears the concern or states that the event has ended.
A historical record is a dated archive, not a statement that an outbreak is still active. Archiving does not change a source’s original confirmation status. A report’s age alone never establishes confirmation or resolution.
How we handle case data
Case figures are stored separately from articles. Ten articles about one patient do not count as ten cases. One event can have many sources, and updates refer back to the same event.
Each statistical record includes a country, period start and end, case definition, source, and source publication date. Suspected, probable, and confirmed cases may be combined by a source; such totals are labelled with their source definition and are not relabelled as confirmed cases. Human case records are not combined with animal detections or numbers of contacts under observation.
Records with overlapping periods or geography are not added together. A national annual total is not added to individual local events from the same period. We do not publish a real-time global active-case total because our reviewed sources do not support one.
Unknown is not zero. “Not reported” means a number is not established in the record. Zero appears only when the underlying source explicitly reports zero for that scope and period.
Dates and freshness
- Source publication: when the original report was published.
- Brief publication: when our editorial brief was first published.
- Editorial review: when the brief was reviewed or substantially updated.
- Data period / as of: the period described by the statistics or event.
- Collection time: when a configured source was last checked; this does not make older reporting new.
News listings sort by the original source date. Case maps label their reporting periods. Collector frequency depends on source availability and the operator’s configured schedule. This project cannot update a case figure before an underlying source publishes it.
What the map can tell you
Markers show approximate reported locations or country reference points. They do not show patient addresses, individual movements, exposure zones, or infection probability. A marker’s size represents a reported count for its labelled period, not current risk.
Coverage is selective and incomplete. Missing records do not establish that a country is free of plague. WHO’s Disease Outbreak News also states that its published events are not an exhaustive list of events to which WHO responds.
Corrections and limitations
Material changes should identify what changed and retain the underlying sources. A source becoming unavailable does not erase its prior record; access failures are tracked separately. See our corrections process and source directory.