America was one raw nerve. An unpopular Republican president had left office, leaving behind an unpopular war to wind down. Democrats now ruled both houses of Congress. The sitting president, a Midwesterner whose ascendancy had been historic, came in without executive experience. The country was deeply divided among itself and cynical distrust of government and corporations alike was rampant. It was 1976. It had been 58 years since the 1918 flu pandemic, called the Spanish Flu because Spain's open reporting on the flu's ravages made it seem more awful than in more censored nations. ... Read More
iPhone App Puts Your Sneezes on the Map
September 2, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Serious iPhone app addicts who've used the tools to find everything from the closest Starbucks to the nearest empty cab can now add another search epidemiologists hope will put public health in your pocket. Researchers at Children's Hospital Boston and the MIT Media Lab now want to help you also pinpoint the nearest person with swine flu. Their application, "Outbreaks Near Me," draws from the HealthMap online project, which synthesizes maps, news reports, official alerts and blogs from across the Web to track infectious diseases. The application's creators hope to empower individual users ... Read More
Survey Rode the Media Wave of Flu Mania
June 12, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
As swine-flu mania was at its hottest back in April, Stanford University academics Marcel Salathé and James Holland Jones saw a unique opportunity to gauge both the public's ignorance and its expertise about an emerging health threat in real time. Notice the term "swine-flu mania." Only on Thursday — seven weeks after the profs' epiphany — did the World Health Organization declare swine flu, or H1N1 if you prefer, a pandemic. The number of new infections and deaths attributable to swine flu grows daily, with a muffled drumbeat of stories across the globe as each locality notches a grim ... Read More
Taking the Temperature of Swine Flu Fears
April 30, 2009 • By • 1 Comment
I am writing this a few hours after the World Health Organization raised the influenza pandemic alert level from 4 to 5, the second highest level, because "a pandemic is imminent." This means that there is human-to-human spread of the virus into at least two countries in one WHO region. But while the virus spreads quickly, information about the virus spreads even faster than the virus itself. By now, almost everyone with access to a news source is aware of swine flu, and people are worried to different degrees and react in very different ways. My colleagues and I who study the spread of ... Read More
