This week, news broke of a new and fatal swine flu on the Mexico-U.S. border. Surgical masks are being distributed throughout Mexico City in an attempt to slow down transmission of this illness.
It has quickly turned into a growing outbreak and according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). While science has yet to cure the common cold or the more serious flu, technology is making it possible to track the spread of an illness like the swine flu. There are several useful online resources that track health information and disease outbreaks.
One of the easiest to use tools is from
HealthMap which aggregates news feeds from the WHO, Google News, ProMED, the
European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and other sources to map out all of the disease outbreaks. Unfortunately it looks like their servers are struggling with the load of visitors so this may not be a reliable source in the coming days and weeks.
If you’re looking at the potential for travel then you should check out
CDC’s Travel Notices. The Center for Disease Controland Prevention is a United States based organisation but it provides information on major outbreaks across the world. The CDC has several levels of notices, from minor cases to epidemics. Always check the CDC’s notices before traveling - especially to areas that may be affected by the swine flu. Keeping up with the times the CDC is twittering updates at
@CDCEmergency. If you prefer you can also access the CDC data via an
RSS feed. Or if you are a visual person you can even check out the CDC’s
Podcasts.
The World Health Organisation itself has a web page with breaking news on major epidemics and outbreaks at
Disease Outbreak News Center. They provide current and historical information on diseases and they too offer an
RSS feed.
The New Zealand Ministry of Health also has a
website and RSS feed but at this time there is no need for them to be urgently reporting on incidents in North America. Hopefully this will not change over time.
Some great technology to keep the world informed. If 100 million people can watch a British singer – keeping up to data with a serious illness should be up there in importance too! While there’s likely to be much concern on social networking sites about public health incidents, it’s best to go direct to the sources of news rather than spreading rumors.
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Just to add to your list of
Just to add to your list of news aggregation tools for health surveillance there are also some other easy to use sites for keeping up to date:
BioCaster: http://www.biocaster.org
EpiSpider: http://www.epispider.org
HealthMap: http://www.healthmap.org
MedISys: http://medusa.jrc.it
Good grief! There are how
Good grief! There are how many - or should I say how few? - confirmed cases of the badly-named swine flu in the whole wide world and we have a "major epidemic".
More people die every day of being beaten to death in more countries than I care to remember - do we get health warnings? More people die every second of every day of starvation - do we ever get to see a news item about the reasons behind it? More people die of all sorts of gruesome diseases every minute of every day - about most of them we never even hear.
Get a grip. The swine-flu hype is fuelled by the pharmaceutical industry's need to get rid of tons of Tamiflu (whose use-by-date is approaching fast). And we're the suckers who buy the stuff. As usual. Maybe we deserve to be conned.
Hi Sabine - I think we must
Hi Sabine - I think we must be on the same wavelength... I just published my latest blog before reading your comment and I've gone and written about the exact same things you've mentioned. Glad to know I share your opinion.
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