v7: Health Signals Get Their Own Lane — WHO, ProMED, ECDC, and a Four-Component Blend
Health and disease intelligence now scores in a dedicated pool, completely separate from geopolitical news. WHO Disease Outbreak News, WHO Global News, ProMED, and ECDC join the existing CDC EID and STAT News feeds. The blending equation shifts to a four-component model: 40% geo + 20% health + 25% market + 15% space weather — all weights normalize automatically when any signal is absent.
Since v3, WakeUpNeo.ai has monitored health and disease signals alongside geopolitical news — but both fed into the same scoring pool. A Reuters article about a missile strike and a CDC EID paper about a novel respiratory pathogen competed for influence in the same average. That architecture worked as a first step, but it created a structural problem: outbreak language is different enough from conflict language that blending them in one pool dilutes both signals.
Four new institutional sources
v7 adds four of the most authoritative early-warning feeds in global public health and expands the total health source pool to six:
| Source | Feed type | Veracity | What it covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| WHO Disease Outbreak News | Official WHO outbreak bulletins | 0.98 | Formal WHO disease event notifications — the highest-authority single-source for outbreak confirmation worldwide |
| WHO Global News | WHO health news and press releases | 0.96 | Policy guidance, emergency declarations, and public health advisories from WHO regional offices |
| ProMED | Moderated expert outbreak reporting | 0.91 | Programme for Monitoring Emerging Diseases — human-curated alerts from physicians and veterinarians watching for novel pathogens in real time |
| ECDC | European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control | 0.94 | EU outbreak intelligence, surveillance summaries, and threat assessments covering communicable diseases across Europe and globally |
| CDC Emerging Infectious Diseases | Peer-reviewed journal — ahead of print | 0.95 | Added in v3 — novel outbreak investigations and drug-resistance findings published before mainstream press coverage |
| STAT News | Specialist health journalism | 0.90 | Added in v3 — rapid biomedical reporting on clinical trials, outbreaks, and public health policy |
Why a separate scoring pool?
Geopolitical and health articles score differently by design. An article about a military confrontation carries high urgency and negative sentiment from words like "strike", "missile", "civilian". An article about a novel pathogen discovery carries its own distinct signals — "transmission", "case fatality rate", "novel strain" — but these rarely overlap with conflict vocabulary. When both types of articles compete in the same mean, a quiet health week suppresses the geo score and a quiet news week suppresses the health score.
Separate pools solve this. The geo pool averages the top 72-hour articles from the five general news sources. The health pool averages articles from the six health and disease sources. Each pool produces an independent 0–10 score, and both feed into the final blend as distinct components. The health layer can register maximum stress without diluting the news layer, and vice versa.
The new four-component equation
The old formula was a two-component blend of news and market signals. v7 splits news into two distinct pools and adds a fourth component (space weather, introduced in v6), producing:
score = geo × 0.40 + health × 0.20 + market × 0.25 + space_weather × 0.15
| Component | Weight | Sources | What it measures |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geo (geopolitical news) | 40% | BBC, Al Jazeera, NPR, Reuters, AP | Conflict, political instability, economic crises from general international news |
| Health | 20% | WHO DON, WHO News, ProMED, ECDC, CDC EID, STAT News | Disease outbreaks, pandemic risk, novel pathogens, public health emergencies |
| Market | 25% | VIX, WTI Oil, 10-Year Treasury, Gold (XAU/USD) | Financial stress — volatility, commodity shocks, yield movements |
| Space weather | 15% | NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center | Solar storm risk — geomagnetic disturbances that can disrupt power grids and communications |
Normalization when signals are absent
Not every component is always available. If a source pool returns no articles within the 72-hour window, its component is excluded and the remaining weights are scaled up proportionally so they still sum to 1.0. A market API outage does not produce a flat reading — the three available components simply share the full weight between them. This means the meter always reflects the most complete picture possible from live data, without defaulting to neutral when one signal goes quiet.
What you will see on the dashboard
The Signal Tabs panel now has a dedicated Health tab alongside Geo, Market, and Space. Each tab shows the component's current score as a coloured badge. The Health tab lists the latest articles from all six health sources, grouped by severity band, with the same AI-scored factor breakdown (urgency, sentiment, veracity, recency) as the other signal views. When the health score is elevated relative to the other components, the badge provides an at-a-glance indicator before you open the tab.