I explore Maastricht

The plenary talk this morning is by Dr Theresa Bernardo, on the effect of social technologies on disease control. It's a fascinating look into how Facebook, twitter, the Internet can be used to gain disease information and how they can be used to control diseases. For example, crowd sourced radiation readings were plotted on maps after the Japan earthquake. When there is a spike in searches on google for "flu symptoms", this is highly correlated with actual cases and in fact " Google flu" is as accurate as traditional passive surveillance methods for tracking flu incidence around the world. Doctor visits are only the tip of the iceberg and actual diagnoses are very slow and cause significant time delays in putting control methods into action, but by using these technologies, interventions can be much more rapid.

By 2020, about 75 percent of the world's deaths will be caused by non communicable diseases like heart disease, cancer and diabetes. One researcher aims to recruit one million women from around the world for breast cancer research. Numbers can be gained much more rapidly than by traditional sampling methods. Web forums and online support groups have organised themselves into large clinical trials.

Collective psychology and intelligence can be used to solve elusive problems. A conundrum in how a particular protein was folded in nature was solved by making it into a game and putting it on the Internet, on a site called Foldit.com. Fifty thousand people played the game and one woman solved the problem, but all 50,000 were included as authors on the paper that was subsequently published in Nature.

After the lectures are finished I ride my bike into "Old Maastricht", the part of the city that was not damaged by bombing in the war. The streets are cobbled and narrow with tall brick buildings rising on each side, and hanging baskets in the windows. High up on the wall of one of the buildings there are carillon bells and it must be on the hour, because they are pealing a tune. There is a festival atmosphere, with street musicians and people of all ages milling around. It's the first week of the new semester at Maastricht University so there are a lot of students about. I can't get over how beautiful almost everyone is here, and how slim people are. I've seen only a few overweight people during my time in Holland so far.

It's obviously not due to the lack of accessibility to calories though. There are waffle shops and gelato parlours in between the clothes and shoe shops. Then I see the most amazing sweet shop... something out of Matthew's dreams, with a whole wall of amazing pick and mix, all labelled " sweet " or " salty ". I have fun selecting a few hundred grams of assorted weird and wonderful candy for Matt (and Hannah and Josh as well!)