H5N1

Canada: Google’s one sick search engine

Via The Globe and Mail: Google’s one sick search engine. Excerpt:

Dr. Google may be a bad substitute for a real physician, but doctors and researchers who track influenza outbreaks are increasingly turning to statistics provided by the powerful search engine to find out when people are falling ill to flu. 

Ontario and Quebec are at the peak of a flu season that arrived early this year and appears to be more severe than usual, and experts say Google Flu Trends gave some of the initial warnings that the virus, which kills 2,000 to 8,000 Canadians each year, had arrived with force. 

Patients may not get a diagnosis or good medical advice through Google, but each search adds to statistics that warn of influenza’s spread. 

“Google Flu gives me a picture of the whole of North America at once. It’s in real time and it’s very useful,” said Dr. Allison McGeer, a microbiologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. 

“Outbreaks come in waves, which make them somewhat predictable, once you know they’re happening. Google Flu has shown to be pretty effective.” 

Days or weeks before most traditional public health data, including school absenteeism, laboratory tests and emergency room visits, can be tracked, Internet users start googling “flu” and Google publishes daily charts and colour-coded maps rating flu activity from minimal (green) to intense (red). 

The map Friday showed Quebec as the only intense jurisdiction in Canada, with every province to the west and Newfoundland showing high. New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were listed as moderate. 

Newfoundland’s largest health authority has closed another seniors home to visitors and imposed visitor restrictions at six of its hospitals as it attempts to contain the spread of an influenza-like virus. Eastern Health on the weekend said the latest closure affects the Golden Heights Manor in Bonavista. Seventeen of the health authority’s facilities have either been closed or are under visitor restrictions, and officials are asking the public not to visit health care facilities if they are ill. 

The Public Health Agency of Canada has a formal flu tracking system – FluWatch – but it records only laboratory-confirmed cases and it recently went two weeks without an update.

Dr. McGeer is a highly respected expert who was in the middle of the SARS outbreak and the H1N1 pandemic, so her endorsement of Google carries weight. As for me, without Google this blog wouldn't exist.

Eurosurveillance: Looking back and looking forward

An important editorial in Eurosurveillance. Excerpt:

The capability to provide timely peer-reviewed information about relevant events that require rapid public health action is one of the main assets of Eurosurveillance and remains high on our agenda. In 2012, when it became known that patients from Saudi Arabia and Quatar with severe respiratory symptoms had been infected with a novel coronavirus, we were among the first scientific journals to provide authoritative information. In total, we published eight peer-reviewed rapid communications related to the event within three months. Some of them were processed in record speed – 24–48 hours from submission. 

This was possible with the support of our contributors and reviewers who agree to follow us on a route that is still unusual and sometimes even controversial in the world of scientific publishing. Our intention in providing timely, authoritative, quality-controlled preliminary information relevant for communicable disease control is not to go after headline stories, but to enable public health action. 

We are well aware that publishing preliminary data needs to be handled with care. Rapid processing may raise questions of quality control and conclusions may change when more evidence becomes available. However, the overall positive experience, gained over 15 years, leads us to conclude that with careful selection and processing, the benefits for public health outweigh the concerns raised and that our approach is justified. 

This is also confirmed by our authors and dedicated peer reviewers who support the concept actively, with important, good-quality contributions. 

Having listed some of our achievements, what can our readers and contributors expect in the coming year? In order to increase transparency, speed up and ease our interaction with authors and reviewers, we will soon introduce an electronic submission system. Authors and reviewers will be asked to log on to the system and follow the instructions when submitting or reviewing for us. 

Moreover, as a new editorial policy we will automatically share the reviews for specific papers between the respective referees. This change is in response to repeated requests from many who would like to see the comments from the other reviewer(s) for the paper they commented on, as a learning experience. 

Another new feature is authors will be expected to outline the contribution of each author to the article – this information will be published at the end of the text. 

We have also started preparing for a new improved website, taking into account the comments obtained from an earlier reader survey and hope to be able to launch it around the start of 2014.

Most discouraging health-ministry website: Iraq's

After a certain amount of digging, I just found the English-language version of the Iraqi Ministry of Health. I wish I hadn't.

Iraq rarely turns up in posts here. It had a couple of human H5N1 cases in Kurdistan back in 2006, and a cholera outbreak, also in Kurdistan, in October of this year.  So I was curious to see what the Iraqis' concerns have been in tackling infectious diseases and public health issues. 

As far as I can tell, the last news item posted has been sitting there since late February. All the items seem to deal with "His Excellency the Minister of Health," who (at least as of last February) is Dr. Majeed Iqmoh. Go the Search function and look for H5N1, H1N1, dengue, or malaria, and may you have better luck than I did. (H1N1 also has a link of its own on the home page, but it goes nowhere.)

The ministry's Arabic-language site does seem current, with 5 news items dated December 16. And the H1N1 link takes you a map of the country showing, presumably, recent cases.

I realize that the western world in general, and the US in particular, has been determined to, um, move on from the Iraq debacle of the last decade. Evidently the Iraqi government would like to move on also, and has decided that it prefers not to tell the non-Arabic world what's happening in public health.

Mike Coston thanks the newshounds, as do I

At Avian Flu Diary, Mike Coston has a post today on Looking For Zebras. It's a well-earned appreciation of the work done by the newshounds—the unpaid volunteers who daily ransack the internet to find (and translate) reports on the outbreak and progress of countless diseases around the world. They do great work, and I join Mike in thanking them.

US: NIAID's new West Nile Virus web page

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) has published a new web page on West Nile Virus. It's clearly a key source of information on the disease. But I wish they had designed it with narrower text columns. In many sections, text runs clear across the page. It's discouraging even to look at, let alone read. A line of 10 or 12 words is far easier to read than a line of 20+ words.

A big step forward for ReliefWeb

ReliefWeb has just undergone a major improvement in its website. The new design is clean, clear, and readable. One glance at the home page and you already know more than you did a moment ago.

Moreover, a column down the right-hand side gives you access to updates in the last 24 hours (I've added a direct link to that page in the News Gatherers list), plus a list of 245 countries and territories that enables you to find out what's new in a particular country—and updates on current humanitarian disasters.

The site also has a blog, and I've added a link to it in the Bloggers list.

This new design greatly improves ReliefWeb's usability and impact, and I know I'll be spending a lot of time on the site, keeping up on stories that might otherwise go unnoticed. 

Haiti: Another look at MSPP's website

I've just had a reminder of the need to keep exploring. For a long time I've assumed the website of Haiti's Ministry of Public Health and Population was little more than some ancient news releases and the much-delayed cholera statistics on its Documentation page.

Well, not so. Today I did some clicking and found a lot more. MSPP's home page, in French, does offer more resources, including cholera reports at the commune level. They're still out of date—we're currently in week 45, and the commune-based reports don't go beyond week 35, which ended September 2. But they're more than I'd expected to find, and I've added the MSPP home page to the Hot Zone Sources list.

It's even possible to follow MSPP on Twitter, and the ministry also has a page on Facebook, most recently updated on October 30. Alas, the latest tweet is from July 17th, and MSPP has just 25 followers. (I'm #25.)

But perhaps the Ministry can be encouraged to be more forthcoming online, and thereby keep the world better informed on public health in Haiti.

India: The ministries of health are silent on encephalitis

In my webwriting workshops, I used to use the website of India's Ministry of Health & Family Welfare as a spectacularly bad example of web design: animated GIFs, random links, and an overall lack of structure and navigation. Revisiting it today after a long absence, I found it much improved in looks. But in one critical way it remains a scandal.

India's media are understandably alarmed today at the reports from Uttar Pradesh about 7 more children dying of encephalitis, bringing the total this year to 390. But when I went to the ministry's site and searched for "encephalitis," I got "No record found."

Well, maybe encephalitis is a state responsibility? Go to the Uttar Pradesh government website and find the Department of Medical Health and Family Welfare. And may you have better luck than I just finding a search function, never mind information on a major disease outbreak.

The Indian media are very fond of damning and blasting their governments for failure to cope with this or that outbreak of dengue or malaria or bird flu. I wish they'd reserve a few damns and blasts for their governments' failure even to use the online tools they have.

MSF offers a new resource

Here's a fascinating and potentially valuable new resource: MSF.TV - Online TV station from Médecins Sans Frontières. I've just stumbled across it and haven't had time to explore it in detail. But it's going into the News Gatherers link, and I expect to visit it often.

Following the novel coronavirus story

If the novel coronavirus could spread online, we'd all be goners by now. The story has been picked up by media around the world and shows no signs of slowing down. 

To follow events, I recommend FluTrackers, who have been on the story since September 20. The newshounds (as we call them in Flublogia) are really good at scanning all possible media and at understanding developments very quickly indeed.