The Democratic Republic of the Congo is currently living through the largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded in its history: 3,626 confirmed cases, 1,589 deaths, surpassing the previous record from 2018-2020 (3,317 cases). That number is real, verified directly against WHO's own feed today - not an estimate.
Here's the problem: it's not published as a number. It's published as a paragraph. WHO's Disease Outbreak News writes each update as prose - dates, context, case counts, and deaths all woven into sentences a human has to read start to finish to extract anything.
That's fine for a public health briefing. It's not fine for someone who just wants to know: which disease, which country, how many cases, how many deaths, and is it getting worse since last time. A journalist tracking five outbreaks at once doesn't have time to read five full reports every time WHO updates one of them.
Outbreak Watch pulls the numbers out for you. It reads WHO's official feed on a schedule, and for each new report, extracts disease, location, total cases, and total deaths - tested against six real, differently-worded WHO reports (three Ebola updates, plus Hantavirus, Nipah, and Yellow Fever) before shipping, not assumed to work from one example. When an outbreak already being tracked gets a new update, it also reports the change since the last count - the evolution, not just a snapshot.
Honest limit: WHO doesn't write every report the same way. Single-case narratives and broad regional overviews often don't state one clean "X confirmed cases" figure - those fields come back empty rather than guessed, with the original summary text kept as a fallback either way.
https://apify.com/0xgollum/outbreak-watch
Source: WHO Disease Outbreak News (https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news), checked live via their public API before writing this.
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