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Preprint Says NCDC AI Tool Has Flagged Over 5,000 Outbreak Alerts Since 2022

The preprint credits multilingual media scanning with sharply reducing manual screening, pending peer review.

Overview

  • Developed by Wadhwani AI, the Health Sentinel system has operated within India’s disease surveillance architecture since 2022 under the National Centre for Disease Control.
  • From April 2022 to April 2025, the tool processed about 300 million news articles in 13 languages and identified roughly 95,000 unique health events across India.
  • Public health experts at NCDC shortlisted more than 3,500 of those events as potential outbreaks, and the authors report issuing over 5,000 real-time alerts to authorities.
  • The study cites a 98% reduction in manual screening workload, with epidemiologists verifying signals before information is shared with state and district officials.
  • Researchers report a 150% increase in published events since deployment and say the tool extracted 96% of events published in 2024, figures that require independent validation.