When Muppets Get Flu

I don’t have much to add to the swine flu situation. It might be a pandemic, it might not, but the best strategy is to a) keep an eye out for more news and b) take reasonable precautions if it becomes necessary. I’m a colossal pessimist, which is great in situations like this, because unless the virus wipes out the entire human race, I’ll be able to say, “Hey, that wasn’t as bad as I was expecting!” Incidentally, can we start calling this “swinfluenza” soon? I’ve got some t-shirts already prepared. They’re the old “henfluenza” t-shirts with tippex over the logo.

First: some useful resources

• WHO Swine influenza briefing
• WHO Pandemic influenza preparedness and response guidance
• The ever-rocking Flu Wiki
• CDC Swine flu information page
• A few comments on pandemic influenza by Terry Jones

You can expect traffic to all these sites to be massive for the duration of this outbreak (or until civilisation collapses, taking the internet with it), so be patient with slow loading pages.

Second: a brief discourse on tracking epidemics

There’s been some discussion about how web and mobile technology can be used to track outbreaks like this – something that’s been floating around for a while, and was of course the starting point for the creation of INSTEDD.

• Evgeny discusses Twitter’s power to misinform
• Erik at WhiteAfrican urges caution but points out that an online ecosystem is emerging
• Mark Honigsberg is less optimistic and thinks a different approach is needed
• Kragen Javier Sitaker explains how false rumors can cost lives

These discussions are relevant, valid, interesting, etc., but I’d like to add two really simple rules of thumb regarding any web-enabled tracking initiatives, both of which are widely appreciated but often forgotten:

1. Garbage in, garbage out.
2. Ground truth everything.

Nearly all of the chatter on social media is garbage, so you do the math.¹ And ground truthing sounds like it should be easy, but it actually isn’t. See? That’s the pessimist in me talking again. Ignore him. Anyway, keep reading other blogs for more swine flu info – I’m going to blog about something else.

1. In fairness, both INSTEDD and Swift River are in fact doing the math. [↩]

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