v3: Health Signal Expansion — CDC Disease Journal and STAT News
The meter gains dedicated pandemic and disease intelligence: the CDC Emerging Infectious Diseases peer-reviewed journal and STAT News join the source list. A new health-specific lexicon (weights v3) gives outbreak and contagion language the weight it deserves.
The scenarios WakeUpNeo.ai is designed to detect — systemic crises, rapid societal disruption — include pandemic outbreaks. Yet the original v1 source list was entirely focused on general news: BBC, Al Jazeera, NPR, and similar outlets. These are excellent at covering a pandemic once it is already global news. They are poor at detecting the early peer-reviewed signals that precede the headlines by weeks.
Two new sources
| Source | Feed type | Veracity | Poll interval | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CDC Emerging Infectious Diseases | Peer-reviewed journal — ahead-of-print | 0.95 | 30 min | WHO-affiliated journal publishing novel outbreak investigations, novel pathogens, and drug-resistance findings before mainstream press coverage |
| STAT News | Specialist health & science journalism | 0.90 | 5 min | Dedicated biomedical reporting — covers clinical trials, outbreak updates, and public health policy faster and with more depth than general outlets |
Why CDC EID specifically?
The CDC publishes several RSS feeds. The newsroom feed covers agency press releases — useful for policy announcements, but slow and filtered through public affairs. The Emerging Infectious Diseases journal ahead-of-print feed is different: it surfaces peer-reviewed research the moment it clears editorial review, before the print issue is assembled. This means novel H5N1 variants, new drug-resistant bacterial strains, and emerging respiratory pathogens appear in our pipeline as early as any outlet in the world can report them.
The v3 lexicon
Adding disease-focused sources without updating the scoring lexicon would undercount their signal. A headline reading "novel respiratory pathogen with 40% case fatality rate" contains none of the classic urgency keywords — "war", "attack", "missile" — that the v1 and v2 lexicon was tuned for. The v3 lexicon corrects this.
- Urgency keywords added: epidemic, virus, pathogen, quarantine, lockdown, contagious, infection, fatality, mortality, hospitali-, WHO, CDC, novel strain, variant, transmission, public health emergency
- Sentiment (negative) keywords added: outbreak, epidemic, fatal, mortalit-, infect-, contagious, pathogen, quarantine, surge, spike, hospitali-, casualt-
- Partial-match suffixes (e.g. hospitali-) catch "hospitalized", "hospitalization", "hospitalizations" without requiring separate entries for each inflection
Effect on the score
In routine news cycles the new keywords will trigger rarely — most days there is no major outbreak story. When they do trigger, they should trigger sharply: a simultaneous WHO emergency declaration, novel pathogen paper in CDC EID, and STAT News coverage of hospital capacity strain would now produce a meaningfully higher meter reading than the same story would have under v2. This asymmetry is intentional. Pandemic risk is a tail risk — it spends most of its time near zero and then moves very fast.
What this does not change
The overall scoring formula — 60% news layer, 40% market layer — is unchanged. The new sources feed into the same 72-hour rolling window and are subject to the same top-100 article mean that determines the news score. No threshold or weight in the final blend has moved. v3 is purely an expansion of coverage breadth and lexical precision.