News, Public Health, Global Health: A Potential Pandemic of Influenza

Public health concerns dominate the news headlines this week, as evidence continues to unfold of a global outbreak of a novel strain of swine influenza A/H1N1.

Thanks to an active international group of Medical Bloggers and Librarians connected through social networking sites such as FriendFeed or Twitter, as I arrive at work on Monday morning, this connectedness becomes a great advantage for those of us in the United States, as our European colleagues have already scanned and posted many news or website links on items of vital concern, as emerging news continues to pour in from many places around the world.

Following are a brief set of links to global health information, disease-tracking and interactive-maps for the spread of Swine Influenza A/H1N1 (reported as of Monday, Apr 27 2009):

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Image credit:  http://www.tweetdeck.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009

International

• World Health Organization (WHO)
• WHO – Swine Influenza Page
• WHO – Epidemic and Pandemic Alert Page
  
• WHO - Global Disease Outbreak News page

• Pro-Med, sponsored by Federation of American Scientists (FAS), is “a program for monitoring emerging infectious diseases“.

• The International Society for Infectious Diseases (ISID) produces ProMed-Mail, described as “the global electronic reporting system for outbreaks of  emerging infectious diseases & toxins, open to all sources“. Subscription to ProMed-Mail is available to anyone, free of charge; updates can be set up for daily or weekly email alerts.

• European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC)

• UCHC Library subscribes to GIDEON (Global Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology Online Network), which is a specialized database for epidemiologists used for “… diagnosis and reference in the fields of tropical and infectious diseases, epidemiology, microbiology and antimicrobial chemotherapy.  GIDEON currently tracks 337 diseases, 224 countries, 1,147 microbial taxa and 306 antibacterial (-fungal, -parasitic, -viral) agents and vaccines, including over 10,000 notes outlining the status of specific infections within each country and over 20,000 images, graphs, interactive maps and references“.  GIDEON is updated daily.

United States

• U.S. Center for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC)
• Swine Influenza Information – CDC
  
• Also see CDC – Swine Flu Guidance for Clinicians & Public Health Officials

• Pandemic Flu Page and Info About Pandemic Staging
  

• Ben Parr on Mashable (Apr 25 2009) has written a concise summary of websites for current and credible information on Swine Flu at http://mashable.com/2009/04/25/track-swine-flu/

Tracking the Outbreaks

• Google provides a free service called News Alert, which you can create yourself using any key-words to search on.

• Swine Flu Time Map – in this example, shown for the United States.

• “2009 Swine Flu H1N1 Outbreak and Migration Map” (on Apr 27 2009) from Live Search: Maps.

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I’d like to acknowledge the cooperative work of many European scientists and medical librarians – and in particular, bloggers Laikas, Berci and DigiCMB – who are always 6-8 hours ahead of me, both literally speaking in the real world and in many Web 2.0 innovations, who have posted scientific links and news about swine flu and steered  me to several links for this post today.   Thank you to these talented, and generous, colleagues.

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