ProMED is a longstanding informal disease surveillance network. It has a worldwide network of clinicians, who send in reports of any unusual health events in plants, animals, or humans. These reports are then vetted by subject matter experts at ProMED before being shared with ProMED’s subscribers. ProMED emails usually contain a wealth of quantitative information about outbreak events. However, this information has so far not been utilised in real-time outbreak analysis. Using the West African Ebola epidemic as a case study, Dr Sangeeta Bhatia (Imperial College London, UK) demonstrated the challenges of using data extracted from ProMED for real-time analysis, with the use of a cleaned data set for the same epidemic that was collated by the World Health Organization as a benchmark to understand what can be inferred in real-time using digital disease surveillance data. Data and code are available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-021-00442-3