Maintenance Notice

Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Who will be affected?

Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Infodemiology

Date Submitted: May 27, 2022
Date Accepted: Apr 11, 2023

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

Open-Source Intelligence for Detection of Radiological Events and Syndromes Following the Invasion of Ukraine in 2022: Observational Study

Stone H, Heslop D, Lim S, Sarmiento I, Kunasekaran M, MacIntyre CR

Open-Source Intelligence for Detection of Radiological Events and Syndromes Following the Invasion of Ukraine in 2022: Observational Study

JMIR Infodemiology 2023;3:e39895

DOI: 10.2196/39895

PMID: 37379069

PMCID: 10365590

Open-source intelligence for detection of radiological events and syndromes following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022

  • Haley Stone; 
  • David Heslop; 
  • Samsung Lim; 
  • Ines Sarmiento; 
  • Mohana Kunasekaran; 
  • Chandini Raina MacIntyre

ABSTRACT

On February 25th, 2022, Russian forces took control of the Chernobyl power plant after continuous fighting within the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Continual events occurred within the month of March which raised the risk of a potential contamination of previously uncontaminated areas, and the potential for impacts on human and environmental health. Due to normal preventive activities and radiation monitoring sensors have been nonfunction, open-source intelligence has become vital when real time data is diminished. This paper aimed to demonstrate the value of two open-source intelligence in the Ukraine to identify signals of potential radiological events of health significance during the Ukrainian conflict. Both EPIWATCH and Epitweetr, two open-source systems, identified potential radiobiological events throughout Ukraine particularly on March 4th in Kyiv, Bucha and 16 reports within Chernobyl. The significance of OSINT during the invasion, where formal reporting will continue to be scarce, will be to supplement more formal data sources and provide essential early warning of radiobiological events and ensure timely emergency and public health response.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Stone H, Heslop D, Lim S, Sarmiento I, Kunasekaran M, MacIntyre CR

Open-Source Intelligence for Detection of Radiological Events and Syndromes Following the Invasion of Ukraine in 2022: Observational Study

JMIR Infodemiology 2023;3:e39895

DOI: 10.2196/39895

PMID: 37379069

PMCID: 10365590

Download PDF


Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.

© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.