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Methodology

What the labels mean, where the data comes from, and what the signal feed can and cannot tell you.

Updated:

Claim labels

  • Official: stated on the record by the competent authority (for Russia: Rospotrebnadzor, the regional government, hospitals speaking for themselves).
  • Reported: carried by credible media or named channels, not confirmed by authorities.
  • Disputed: contradicted by authorities, by the institution concerned or by an on-site check.
  • Retracted: published and then deleted or reworded by its source.

"Official" means "said by an official", not "true". When Russian authorities state something that independent reporting contradicts, both appear side by side.

Curated data

The Irkutsk briefing, country profiles, foci and history are written by hand from primary sources: WHO (fact sheet, Weekly Epidemiological Record, guidelines), CDC (MMWR, NNDSS), ECDC, Rospotrebnadzor and its anti-plague institutes, and peer-reviewed literature. Russian official statements are cited via Interfax, TASS and regional outlets because rospotrebnadzor.ru does not load from outside Russia.

The signal feed

An ingest worker runs every 15 minutes and reads 20 sources: WHO Disease Outbreak News, CDC NNDSS weekly tables, the ECDC threats report, ProMED, CIDRAP, Outbreak News Today, Google News searches in 7 languages and GDELT. Then it:

  1. Filters for plague. "Plague" is used figuratively all the time, and in Russian, German and French the same word names animal diseases such as African swine fever. A per-language filter requires disease context and excludes those uses.
  2. Deduplicates by URL and by near-identical headline, so a wire story syndicated forty times appears once.
  3. Attributes a country from the content, never from the publisher's location. Place names (Irkutsk, Ituri, Inner Mongolia) take precedence over countries merely mentioned as observers.
  4. Scores strength from source tier (official, specialist, news) and recency. Strength describes the signal, not the event: it is not a risk score.

A signal is a headline. It is never counted as a case.

Public attention

The attention panels show daily Wikipedia pageviews for the plague article in English, Russian and German, relative to the September median. They measure interest, not disease.

Corrections

Errors are corrected as soon as they are confirmed and listed in the update log with the date and affected pages. We do not silently rewrite published claims.

Limits

  • No laboratory results for the Irkutsk case have been published; we cannot know more than the sources say.
  • Many countries do not report plague to WHO every year. "No data" is never shown as zero.
  • Map markers for natural foci are approximate centres, not boundaries.