Patients Like Me [patientslikeme.com] seems like the most useful example of the combination of sophisticated data visualization and online social media. It demonstrates the power of the social aggregation of data, and the tilting equilibrium between privacy and value creation for people who crave to access valuable information about their own faith.

The first, almost obvious, feature allows people with a life-changing disease (e.g. ALS, HIV, Parkinson's, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, MS) to connect to others in the same situation, for instance to learn how they treat their disease or to compare one's own health progress with those of others. Even more, by sharing their own health profile, patients are empowered to exchange valuable data about the real-world effects of specific medical treatments. In practice, this means anyone can explore a rich collection of crowd-sourced data about individual diseases, symptoms or treatments.

For instance, patients are able to explore the efficacy, side effects, adherence and burden of the "Carbidopa-Levodopa" treatment meant to remedy Parkinson's disease, or investigate the effects of Lithium intake on the ALS disease, solely based on the quantitative and qualitative input of thousands of individuals.

In what seems a quite revolutionary take on medical privacy, the diseases, treatments and symptoms of individual patients can be filtered, searched and compared. Alternatively, people with a specific symptom, let's say "fatigued", can investigate the effectiveness of the most popular treatments or compare their faith with the other 27,000 patients that experience this very symptom.

See also Who is Sick Map, Google Flu Trends, CureHunter, Diseasome, Visualizing Health Issues, The Cost of Getting Sick and Epidemiological Diseases Map.

Yet another example of what many believe (myself included) is an imminent revolution of the role of patient-controlled medical data. This is very much in the spirit of Indivo. When you combine the serendipitous nature of the mashup-web with a thirst amongst patients to learn more about their chronic diseases within a social network outside the confines of institutions that have less incentive to adopt such technology, it is only a matter of time before things change in a very fundamental way.

Stay tuned for much more on this topic.

These projections, however, assume that SIV DNA sequences mutate at the same rate as HIV's modern pace of evolution, which many say is much faster than historic rates of change. So some researchers have sought other lines of evidence. A related virus found embedded within the genome of lemurs from Madagascar pointed to a timescale of millions of years. And although SIV-infected chimpanzees remain susceptible to disease, other wild monkeys that have coexisted with SIV for longer, including sooty mangabeys and African green monkeys, seem to have evolved complete immunity to the virus, indicating an extended period of coevolution.

" .. it probably took a long time before SIV turned harmless in most monkeys. As such, people should not rely on evolution alone to fight the threat of HIV, she cautions. "Will humans [...] learn to cope? Perhaps. Do I want to wait for that? No."