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Topic filterDisease and outbreaks news API
Illness, epidemics, treatments and public health response. Pass topic=TAX_DISEASE to filter.
What does the disease and outbreaks topic actually cover?
Outbreak reporting, treatment developments, public health measures and health system capacity. Mixes clinical reporting, policy coverage and consumer health content under one identifier.
How do I filter news to disease and outbreaks?
Pass topic=TAX_DISEASE on /search or /stories. Pair with the health-security signal to weight toward outbreak and emergency coverage rather than general health content. Country filters matter because public health reporting is intensely national — the same disease is covered as a domestic policy story in one market and an international story in another.
GET /stories?topic=TAX_DISEASE&mode=hybrid&from=2026-07-24&limit=20What catches people out with disease and outbreaks coverage?
News coverage is a poor proxy for epidemiology. It responds to novelty and to policy decisions rather than to case numbers, and coverage frequently declines while a situation continues. Use it for timeliness and public response, not for prevalence.
Who publishes on it
Health and science desks at national outlets, specialist medical trade press, and consumer health content that shares the same vocabulary. Public health agencies drive announcement timing, and coverage is intensely national even for cross-border situations.
In the sample, 1356 outlets carry disease and outbreaks coverage at about 2
articles each. The busiest is china.com at roughly 3%,
and china.com, udn.com, zazoom.it account for about 5% between them.
Flat enough that volume here translates fairly directly into independent reporting rather than one newsroom publishing repeatedly.
What it is best for
Best for tracking public response, policy measures and the timing of official announcements. Weakest as any kind of epidemiological measure, since coverage tracks novelty and policy rather than case numbers and routinely declines while a situation continues.
Monitoring it over time
Separate outbreak reporting from general health content before doing anything analytical, because they share vocabulary and respond to different drivers. Coverage concentrates around official announcements, so a rise usually indicates that an agency communicated rather than that conditions changed, and the two are easy to conflate when reading volume alone. Veterinary and agricultural health coverage is worth watching alongside human health, since a large share of emerging outbreaks appear in animal populations first and are reported in agricultural trade press weeks earlier. That stream uses entirely separate vocabulary, sits under different topics, and is routinely missed by monitoring built exclusively around human disease terms.
Which signals pair with disease and outbreaks?
Topic filtering answers what an article is about. Signals answer how strongly it reads that way and in what register, so combining them is usually sharper than either alone.
health_security— Outbreaks and health emergencieshealthcare— Care delivery, providers, public healthanxiety— Public alarm and apprehension
GET /search?topic=TAX_DISEASE&signal=health_security&signal_min=0.25Recent coverage
From the index on 2026-07-31, in the language each was published in.
- Tick-born rabbit disease reported on Long Island
- ED conducts raids in ISISinspired 2022 Coimbatorecar bomb blast case
- Rhode Island West Nile Risk Raised To High
- Warren Beatty 'Reached Out' to Carly Simon Amid Parkinson's Diagnosis Despite 'Old Grudges'
- Winter Park nonprofit helps disabled adults gain job skills
- Superdrug launch STI 'morning after pill' that prevents chlamydia - as cases surge across UK
- Melanoma Warning Signs: When Should You Worry About a Mole? Cleveland Clinic and NHS Explain
- BP puts North Sea drilling business up for sale in £2bn move
Who covers it
china.com · udn.com · zazoom.it · setn.com · themarketsdaily.com · tribunnews.com · tickerreport.com · dailypolitical.com · haberler.com · inewsgr.com · sina.com.cn · baomoi.com
Counts are provisional pending a snapshot against the API.