Outbreak Watch

An Alexa+ MCP server that answers spoken questions about disease outbreaks in India, using reports since 2009 to the government's Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP).

"Alexa, ask Outbreak Watch what's going around in Kerala." "In Kerala so far this year, the most reported outbreaks are food poisoning with 854 cases, gastroenteritis with 780 and hepatitis with 467. That's data through March 2026."

Why

India publishes outbreak reports for every district, every week, but they sit in PDFs and spreadsheets that most families, school principals and community health workers never open. Outbreak Watch puts them behind a question you can ask out loud: is dengue around here, is it the season for it, and is it getting worse.

It's built on research. In our Telemedicon 2026 abstract (Kota & Dandi) we tested whether this data can be forecast at all. Error rose from a median 77% nationally to 105% at district level, and a plain linear trend was never beaten. So Outbreak Watch tells you what has been reported and when diseases usually peak, and it declines to predict where the data is too sparse.

Related MCP server: who-gho

What you can ask

It covers 16 diseases across 764 districts and every state, 2009 to March 2026.

How it works

Alexa+ or any MCP client
        │  POST /mcp  (JSON-RPC, Streamable HTTP, protocol 2025-11-25)
        ▼
Outbreak Watch MCP server  ──  tools, resources, prompt, server instructions
        │
        ▼
IDSP outbreak aggregates (data/, 16 diseases × 764 districts × 2009-2026)

Design choices that matter for a voice assistant:

• Spoken answers. Every tool returns one to three sentences ready to be read aloud, plus structured output (with an output schema) for screens like Echo Show. Server instructions tell the model to keep it short and say how current the data is.

• Names people actually say. "Bangalore" finds Bengaluru Urban, "Mumbai" covers both Mumbai districts, "Gurgaon" finds Gurugram, "jaundice" maps to hepatitis, and small speech-to-text typos still match. Telangana districts include their pre-2014 Andhra Pradesh records.

• Asks instead of guessing. There are two Aurangabads, so the server asks which state you mean.

• Fair comparisons. "This year so far" is compared with the same months of last year, not with a full year.

• Honest about limits. trend_outlook applies the study's rule (at least 24 populated months in a 48-month window) and refuses district-level forecasts.

• Data fix. IDSP files a report under its epidemiological year, but the source export dates it by outbreak start. That puts late-December outbreaks reported in week 1 into "December" of the new year. The server detects this and counts them in January, so coverage reads March 2026 rather than December.

MCP details

• Protocol 2025-11-25 over Streamable HTTP, using the official TypeScript SDK (1.32.1).

• Stateless: each POST gets a fresh server and transport, so it scales horizontally with no session store. GET /mcp returns 405.

• Seven read-only tools with readOnlyHint annotations and output schemas, two resources (outbreak-watch://about, outbreak-watch://diseases) and a health_brief prompt.

• DNS-rebinding protection through Host header validation, an optional bearer token (MCP_AUTH_TOKEN), and a /health endpoint.

• An Agent Skill that teaches any agent which tool to use and how to phrase answers for voice.

Run it

Needs Node.js 20 or later.

npm install
npm run dev        # MCP server at http://127.0.0.1:3000/mcp
npm test           # 15 tests, including a real Streamable HTTP round trip

Try it with the MCP Inspector: run npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector, choose Streamable HTTP, and connect to http://127.0.0.1:3000/mcp.

Or add it to an agent, for example Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http outbreak-watch http://127.0.0.1:3000/mcp

Simulated Alexa+ experience

demo/ is an Echo Show-style web app. You tap the mic and ask a question. The demo server, an MCP client, discovers Outbreak Watch's tools, lets an LLM (Groq, openai/gpt-oss-120b) call them, then speaks the answer and draws a card from the structured output. The MCP trace panel shows each tools/call as it happens.

cp .env.example .env     # add your GROQ_API_KEY
npm run dev              # terminal 1: MCP server
npm run demo             # terminal 2: http://127.0.0.1:3001

Speech recognition works in Chrome and Edge. The API key stays on the demo server and is never sent to the browser.

Deploying beyond localhost

HOST=0.0.0.0 ALLOWED_HOSTS=outbreak.example.com MCP_AUTH_TOKEN=change-me npm run dev

Put it behind HTTPS. ALLOWED_HOSTS keeps Host-header validation on when you bind to all interfaces.

Data

• Source: outbreak reports under the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (IDSP), compiled by Dataful.

• Processing: the aggregates in data/ come from the pipeline in idsp-disease-surveillance.

• Caveats: these are outbreak notifications, not every case, so they understate the true burden, and reporting completeness varies by state. This is public-health information, not medical advice.

License

Code: MIT. The data comes from public government reports; see the sources above.