By Tom Cheshire, Technology Correspondent
Better maps could have helped contain the deadly Ebola virus, according to Medecins Sans Frontieres.
Ivan Gaytan, technology advisor to MSF, told Sky News the disease is "preventable" and could have been "easier to contain" if there was more knowledge of the region.
He said: "In any country where Ebola or any other infectious disease arrives, if you already have a good map which actually reflects the way people describe geography, you set up your clinical activities to take that data in the first place in the right way."
MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders, will launch a project next month called Missing Maps, which lets anyone, anywhere in the world, annotate maps to show dwellings and infrastructure.
Volunteers are mapping regions within the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan in the hope that, if an outbreak occurs, more accurate maps will help health workers respond quicker.
Knowing where people live and what infrastructure they use is vital to dealing with public health emergencies.
These maps will provide important information for NGOs and public health officials.
Liz Hughes, the CEO of MapAction, told Sky News: "You could look at Ebola and say it's an emergency that is a geographic emergency.
"It's really important to stop the transmission of disease, and you do that by identifying where the highest infection rates are - so being able to map that picture.
"Where people have contracted Ebola, where they're moving to, where the treatment centres are, whether they're in the right places - all of that can be mapped to help decision makers work out where to put resources."
Mobile phone data is also helping to create new types of maps.
This week, IBM Research unveiled a system to let people in Sierra Leone report Ebola-related issues and to track the disease.
Swedish NGO Flowminder has also been analysing the movements of thousands of mobile phone users.
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