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Others say that tracking the spread of the virus could help reveal how deadly it is, how easily it spreads, whether drug resistance is emerging, and how to target precious public-health resources. Jeffrey Herrmann, an applied mathematician and software engineer at the University of Maryland, has developed software that can analyze the spread of a disease and pinpoint the best locations for treatment or mass vaccination. He says that this approach "could be used by local public-health departments to determine how many sites and how many staff they need to dispense antiviral medication or vaccinate people."
The WHO's Pandemic Influenza Task Force decided on Monday to raise the alert to level 4 on the pandemic scale. This means that confirmed human-to-human transmissions are now causing community-level outbreaks.
"We might expect up to 30 percent to 40 percent of the population to become ill in the next six months," says Neil Ferguson, a member of the WHO task force and a professor of epidemiology at Imperial College London. He adds that the virus appears less lethal than H5N1 bird flu--but crucially, it's more contagious. In the six years since its emergence in 1993, H5N1 has killed 257 people; swine flu has already killed 150 in a matter of weeks. The last pandemic, Hong Kong flu, killed about 700,000 (1 in 1,000 of its victims) in 1968.
So far, no deaths have been reported outside of Mexico, but the consensus among virologists is that it is too early to say whether suggestions that the death rate is higher in Mexico will be borne out. Some have suggested that better treatment in the United States has made infections there less dangerous. Or it could be that the much greater number of cases seen so far in Mexico--there are now more than 2,000 suspected--has made some deaths there more likely.
Pharmaceutical firms, meanwhile, have begun the race to produce a vaccine. Switzerland's Novartis said on Tuesday that it had received the genetic code of the new virus strain, enabling it to begin work in earnest. The WHO estimates that an effective inoculation is still six months away, but this might be in time for a second wave of infection later in the year.
Peter Dunnill, a professor of biochemical engineering at University College London, warns that even if a vaccine is produced, not everyone will have access to it. "Based on calculations done in relation to H5N1, the global capacity for providing a vaccine at its most optimistic is less than 10 percent of the world's people," he says.
Antiviral drugs are likely to provide the first line of defense. In the United States, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said recently that she will release a quarter of the 50 million courses of antiviral drugs in the national stockpile. She added that the Defense Department has another 7 million courses ready. But their effectiveness could be short lived--particularly if they are used now, and the virus resurfaces later in the year. Professor of immunology Peter Lachmann of the University of Cambridge says, "Tamiflu resistance is extraordinarily widespread and develops very quickly. We would be very lucky if this virus does not develop resistance."
Scientists are exploring faster approaches to making vaccines against the H1N1 virus.
Looking at the disease worldwide allows scientists to track efforts to fight it.
Contrary to certain assertions, the fact is Twitter has provided a lot of valuable information to many people in a rapid manner. In particular, and by way of example, check out the information from these Swine Flu Tweeters at Twitter - @interoperable, @Everybodysafe, or @gfriese, to name a few.
For an article of the potential benefits and uses of Twitter for Emergency Management also visit http://preparednesstoday.blogspot.com.
As with any open communications medium there is a likelihood that misinformation will be disseminated and shared, but that is no different from the local gossip transmitted one haircut at a time at the local barbershop.
CDC reports are not comprehensive
It is worth stating that the only cases the CDC is reporting are confirmed cases. A much more comprehensive mapping of suspected and confirmed cases is happening here: http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com
This FluTracker may be one of the only sources mapping the locations of suspected and confirmed cases, as opposed to the HealthMap which just maps out articles that mention flu and places.
-josh
I've posted some good resources to the Earth Intelligence Network Twitter feed http://twitter.com/earthintelnet
Most recently, from the National Library of Medicine.
Jason Liszkiewicz
Executive Director (NYC), Earth Intelligence Network 501(c)3
Public Intelligence in the Public Interest
www.earth-intelligence.net
EIN Twitter Feed
Cyber Scout Hyper Link-Table
Free Collective Intelligence Book
http://re-configure.org
http://smart-city.re-configure.org
Seems like an ideal opportunity to validate models that have been generated and studied for years. If the correlations are good, the patterns of occurence should be predictable, and subsequently observable. Otherwise, perhaps we should reconsider the value of many academic models of the environment?
Real-Time Syndromic Surveillance
Prehospital emergency medical services dispatchers in 9-1-1 (or equivalent) communications systems in many cities around the world use a system called FirstWatch (www.firstwatch.net). "From pandemic disease outbreaks to bioterrorism, FirstWatch provides real-time situational awareness Dashboards and Data Analysis to Public Health and Public Safety teams by automatically detecting potentially threatening trends, patterns or geographic clusters of occurrences as they develop."
9-1-1 dispatchers interrogate callers to determine what resources to send and provide appropriate first-aid instructions over the phone before paramedics arrive. They are following algorithmic scripts based on patient symptoms and circumstances. The information reveals what types of symptoms the patient has. Certain patterns of clusters of symptoms point to different categories of problems. Seeing these patterns in non-random distributions, geographically or temporally, triggers alerts to emergency and public health system managers.
This is useful for early real-time detection of both natural and bio-terrorism disease situations.
--- Mic
Mic Gunderson
President, IPS
Public Safety Consultant
Everyday, this website compiled using data from official sources, news reports...
> Grippe A H1N1
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1 Comment
Tracking virus or news stories
"other Internet tools are helping to track the spread of the virus geographically. HealthMap,"
Flag shows up in AZ but it is a story written about the virus. No outbreak here, yet. Same with other points. One would think with the above comment that by selecting a disease that the location of those would be shown.
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