Data Sources & Verification Methodology
How Plague Outbreak Map monitors authoritative public-health sources, stages candidate reports and protects confirmed statistics from ambiguous, duplicate or conflicting information.
Purpose and scope
This methodology applies to the current-outbreak tracker and its public statistics. The tracker is designed to report source-traceable plague information without treating every monitored mention as a confirmed outbreak. Historical reference material and general medical information are kept distinct from current outbreak records.
For the current published situation, visit the Live Plague Outbreak Map or the Plague Outbreaks page.
Authoritative source policy
The automated monitor is restricted to configured public-health sources. Core references include the World Health Organization (WHO), U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). A monitored page is not itself evidence that a new outbreak exists; the underlying report must support the specific claim and figures being considered.
Monitoring and candidate staging
Configured sources are checked every 30 minutes for changes. Relevant changes may be staged as candidate reports for evaluation. Candidate reports are structurally separate from public confirmed outbreak records, so detection alone cannot change the live map or confirmed totals.
Last checked: October 7, 2026 2:30 pm. This timestamp means the system looked for source changes; it does not mean a health authority published a new report at that time.
Confirmed
A record that has met the tracker’s publication requirements and is supported by an approved authoritative public-health source. Only confirmed records contribute to confirmed case and death totals.
Suspected
Information indicating possible plague activity that is not represented as a confirmed case count. It remains separate from confirmed statistics.
Unverified
Information that has not met the evidence requirements for confirmed or suspected publication. It never contributes to confirmed statistics.
Deterministic publication checks
Before a candidate can qualify for automated publication, the workflow checks source identity and host, plague relevance, country or location, event and publication dates, explicit confirmed case figures, and whether reported numbers are supported by the source excerpt. Records with uncertainty, missing required evidence, impossible figures, stale or future dates, or other safety failures are held rather than published.
Duplicates, conflicts and cumulative totals
The tracker applies duplicate and conflict protection so repeated source material does not create duplicate outbreaks. Existing matching confirmed records and ambiguous cumulative updates are held for review rather than automatically added to prior totals. Death figures cannot exceed case figures.
Automation and human-readable evidence
Automated tools may help extract and classify source information, but extracted text alone is not treated as confirmation. Public statistics are governed by deterministic validation requirements and source-backed evidence. The tracker is intentionally conservative when evidence is incomplete or conflicting.
Corrections, limitations and transparency
Public-health reporting can change as investigations develop. Source organizations may revise classifications or cumulative figures, and the tracker may therefore update records when better authoritative evidence becomes available. A missing record does not prove that plague is absent from a location; it means the tracker does not currently publish a qualifying record for it.
Where available, public outbreak records link to the underlying source so readers can inspect the evidence directly. Questions about the disease itself should be checked against authoritative medical guidance, including the references on our Pneumonic Plague page.