Disease Info

This project is basically for getting information about diseases from Health Organizations and rare disease databases. It is written in Ruby, to contribute, check out the Contribution Guide.

Requirements

• Ruby 3.2.10
• Rails 7.1
• SQLite3 (development/test)
• PostgreSQL (production)

Getting Started

Clone the project repository by running the command below if you use SSH

git clone git@github.com:devcenter-square/disease-info.git

If you use https, use this instead

git clone https://github.com/devcenter-square/disease-info.git

Database

This project uses SQLite3 for development and testing and PostgreSQL for production. To contribute, you only need to install SQLite3. If you already have it installed on your machine, you can skip to the next step.

If you don't have it installed, check the following links for guides on how to install:

• SQLite - Installation by Tutorials Point
• How to install SQLite3 by Mislav Marohnić

Setting Up

• cd into the project directory.
• Run bundle install
• then rails db:create
• then rails db:migrate

Populating the Database

Populate the database with disease info from individual sources or all at once:

rake mine_data:who        # Scrape WHO fact sheets
rake mine_data:orphanet   # Fetch Orphanet rare disease data with prevalence
rake mine_data:all        # Fetch from all sources

When this is done, visit the endpoint for diseases on http://localhost:3000/diseases to get a list of all diseases on your database.

Adding a new data scraper

The present scrapers are:

• WHO — collects data from WHO's Fact Sheets page (symptoms, transmission, diagnosis, treatment, prevention)
• Orphanet — fetches rare disease data from Orphadata epidemiology XML (6,443 diseases with prevalence data, CC BY 4.0)

Each scraper lives in app/lib/scrapers/<source>/ and follows the same pattern: Request, Response, Parser, and DiseaseParser classes.

To add a new scraper:

1. Create your scraper classes in app/lib/scrapers/<source>/
2. Add a rake task in lib/tasks/mine_data.rake
3. Add a method to app/lib/data_miner.rb
4. Set data_source on each Disease record to your source name (e.g., "CDC")
5. Namespace the disease name with the source (e.g., "Malaria - WHO")
6. Add the source URL in the more column

Available End Points

End Point	Method	Expected response
/diseases	GET	Gets a list of all diseases
/diseases?data_source=source	GET	Gets a list of diseases from a particular source. Available sources: WHO, ORPHANET
/diseases/:disease	GET	Gets a particular disease with the supplied name
/diseases/:disease/:attribute	GET	Gets a specific attribute of a disease (e.g. symptoms, treatment)
/diseases/:disease/set_active_status	PUT	Sets the active status of a disease (is_active: true/false)

Disease Fields

Each disease record includes:

Field	Type	Description
name	string	Disease name with source suffix (e.g., "Malaria - WHO")
data_source	string	Source identifier: "WHO" or "ORPHANET"
prevalence	decimal	Cases per 100,000 population (null if unavailable)
facts	array	Key facts about the disease
symptoms	array	Symptom descriptions
transmission	array	Transmission methods
diagnosis	array	Diagnostic procedures
treatment	array	Treatment information
prevention	array	Prevention strategies
more	string	Source URL
is_active	boolean	Whether the disease record is active

Road Map

To see it live, visit the deployed API. For a specific disease, use /diseases/tuberculosis. Disease-info prettifies JSON on production; if you want JSON prettified in development and you are using Chrome, you could install JSON Formatter to get a prettier display.

To Do

First see the Contribution Guide for how to contribute.

• Add more Health Organizations' disease information sites (e.g., CDC)
• Include a way to verify the scraped data
• Put the symptoms of each disease in an array
• Add a second data source (Orphanet)
• Add prevalence field