GIDEON: Versatile, All-In-One Digital Resource for Infectious Diseases 

Are you looking for a quick, easy-to-use, up-to-date, global infectious disease database? GIDEON is the resource to start with! This unique database provides comprehensive, real-time data on infectious diseases, epidemiology research, and global outbreaks. To learn more about GIDEON’s key features, check out our previous blog post on the tool

Gideon breaks information into 5 interacting modules:

• Explore (here you can look up travel information for a specific country)
• Lab (to identify a pathogen)
• Diagnose (to diagnose a disease or run a differential diagnosis)
• Visualize (uses maps and graphs to display information)
• Analyze (for public health research to analyze outbreaks)

Let’s see how a clinician could use GIDEON to address a specific patient case. 

The case: 

A healthy 79-year-old woman recently spent two weeks traveling in Tanzania as part of a tour group. She returned two weeks ago. She developed upper abdominal pain beginning a week ago, the pain worsened, and she was admitted to the hospital through the emergency room. Your question is whether she acquired an infectious disease while visiting Tanzania that explains her symptoms. 

Use GIDEON to get more information. 

If you want to follow along in GIDEON, search for GIDEON in Lane Search on the library website and select GIDEON : Global Infectious Disease & Epidemiology Network

Click the Diagnose icon on the GIDEON homepage. You will see two paths for arriving at a differential diagnosis. Let’s follow the Step by Step pathway.

1. Click on the circle located in the center of the abdomen on the human image.

2. Add details 
3. Look at the Differential (see image) generated by the software.

Next steps:

Clicking any disease name takes you to a brief description of that disease.

From the Disease page, you can link to global outbreak maps, lists of recent research on the disease, and you are able to search for disease information for a specific country. In Tanzania, GIDEON cites a hospital-based cross-sectional study from Dar es Salaam. See the video below for a walk-through of the case.

Please let your liaison librarian know if you have any questions about GIDEON.