Just in case you're not getting enough up-to-the-minute news about swine flu, you can log in to Twitter to get updates from the government's Centers for Disease Control.
The CDC is using Twitter to spread the word on how not to spread or get swine flu. The CDC has several Twitter accounts including @CDCemergency, which is posting new recommendations, bulletins on confirmed cases, and information on antiviral drugs and other ways to deal with or prevent the disease.
The Associated Press reports that there have been more than 1,600 reported cases and the number of suspected deaths has reached 149 in Mexico. At 1 p.m. Eastern Monday, the CDC reported 40 confirmed cases in the United States: California (7), Kansas (2), New York City (28), Ohio (1), and Texas (2). One person has been hospitalized, but there have been no deaths.
Another Twitter account, @CDC-eHealth, is updated less often but has some good advice including this link to a CDC site where you can send family and friends a "handwashing eCard."
You can also search Twitter for "swine flu" where you'll find a lot of tweets, but use caution before taking advice from sources that you have no particular reason to trust.
And there is indeed plenty of discussion about the disease. Nielsen Online released data that shows that the volume of conversations about swine flu "have already exceeded nearly 10 to 1 those surrounding the salmonella and peanut butter scares from earlier this winter."
Of course all general news organizations have information including our own CBSNews.com which has an excellent and relatively reassuring video from "CBS Evening News" M.D. Dr. John LaPook. (CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)
WebMD.com has a swine flu FAQ and as Don Reisinger pointed out in a Webware post about online resources for tracking swine flu, Google has a map that tracks locations of cases around the world.
From my own experience, using the Web to get health information can be quite useful but it can also lead to unnecessary panic. It's a great way to get general information, prevention tips, and information on how to handle a known condition, but be cautious when using it to try to diagnose yourself. When you do online research about symptoms, you are likely to find a wide variation of causes from the benign to deadly. Yes, a cough can be a symptom of lung cancer, but it can also be from a common cold. If I do suspect something is wrong, I usually go to a doctor, not a URL. If you do go online for health information be sure it's a reputable site like WebMD, one of the state or federal government sites (including healthfinder.gov), or a site run by a respected health care provider.
Updated to include link to number of cases and links to Nielsen Online data.
WebMD's symptom analysis is nice.
Although you can't singlehandedly fix the woes of national health care that are spotlighted in the movie Sicko, many free Web sites at least put a bit more power in your hands to manage personal wellness or a medical crisis. Just share your data wisely.
WebMD (a Webware 100 winner) offers videos, virtual support groups, quizzes, blogs, doctor lookups, and a spiffy symptom checker. Look up drugs by a pill's color, imprint or shape. WebMD won't spam you, but as with its competitors, if you subscribe to e-mail updates about some unappetizing ailment, then prepare for related tidbits in your in-box. It's too bad that some ads, like those for toothpaste, are hard to distinguish from the rest of WebMD.
Although WebMD offers more activities, HealthAtoZ is also helpful, letting you chat with nurses and create a personal health record with feeds from your insurance claims. But community features, blogs, and videos are lacking.
RevolutionHealth pivots around a treatment portfolio you create in addition to blogging and rating doctors and hospitals. You can pose questions anonymously to the community. Talking to experts about care and insurance costs $129 annually, or is free for a month.
A newer site, TauMed (also here), enables you to create a medical library of clips from the Web, as well as a Health Space profile to add doctors and collect "friends." The question-and-answer service is novel--although it lacks a stealth mode in case you're curious about something blush-worthy.
The ad-free, clean, and less peppy FamilyDoctor and HealthFinder are excellent and encyclopedic. You can dig deeper into the latest medical studies via the National Library of Medicine's Pub Med and Medline, which also offers drug interaction lookups.
For health care quests, social networking takes on a deeper dimension beyond collecting friends, songs and party plans on MySpace or Twitter and the like. Ill people from around the world can compare symptoms anonymously online, share suffering or healing tales, and tip off each other about treatments.
PatientsLikeMe hosts support communities for people dealing with ALS, Parkinson's disease, or multiple sclerosis. You can create quick graphs that track prescription regimens and symptoms. Hopefully similar tools are in the works for a wider array of conditions. I like PatientsLikeMe's Answer Network, a Q&A service that delivers data in novel ways. For instance, bar charts display other members' top reasons for discontinuing specific drugs.
Patients Like Me helps you track complex drug dosages and symptoms.
In addition to linking you with strangers, the Internet provides gathering spaces for family and friends. I've used theStatus, which partners with hospitals, to see from San Francisco how a dear family friend in Ohio fared after heart surgery. TheStatus feels like it sounds--a no-nonsense check-in service for the straight dope on an urgent medical situation. You can leave well wishes, too. BabyStatus is new.
I have another close family friend whose ongoing medical care requires regular attention from people in far-flung places. We tried to set up a Web-based spreadsheet to track our visits via Google Docs & Spreadsheets (more here), but only the few geeks among us could get past the awkward document-sharing steps.
We turned next to CarePages, which was built for our purpose. But its colorful design somehow didn't feel appropriate for tracking the care of a retired mathematics professor who would kick back with paperbacks about string theory in his free time. But CarePages seems a good fit for the million families, particularly those with young children, it has served. Opening a page is uncomplicated. There are sections for pediatric cancer, brain injury, and much more. CarePages is now part of RevolutionHealth.
Similarly, CaringBridge steps you through selecting one of several age-appropriate designs for a patient. You can share photo galleries, a guest book and a journal. But while I picked privacy options, CaringBridge displayed my password in clear type on its site. At least nobody was looking over my shoulder. Security sin aside, I can see why the nonprofit site's ease of use has led to success for more than a decade with some 64,000 patient sites.
With any highly personalized service dealing with sensitive topics, security should be paramount. It's hard to peek inside these sites without registering. You might want to set up a separate e-mail account for medical matters first, and never use your real name as a user ID.
The Truste seal marking WebMD, FamilyDoctor, HealthAtoZ, and CarePages shows that they use the same encryption as bank sites (so does theStatus). I like WebMD's privacy policy best for telling you how you can ask to yank your data from its servers.
All of these Web sites pledge not to send all of your data with third parties--except for John Law. No patient-client privilege here. If you are hiding a medical condition that you don't want unearthed by a search warrant, then you have the nearly impossible option of accessing these sites with a PC and IP address separate from anything else you do in life, also while using strong security software. That's still no guarantee that you won't leave personal cookie crumbs.
On that note, wouldn't it be nice if you could find what's inside all of your medical files from over the years, lickety-split, just like Googling yourself? What if you could connect that information to your genetic code? Such dreams of convenience would trigger obvious privacy nightmares. As Web-based health care tools become easier and richer to use, striking the balance between approachability and security will become trickier.
Avain flu on Google Earth
(Credit: Ohio State University)Biomedical researchers wanted to get a good look at the avian flu virus. And they did not turn to a super microscope. They used Google Earth instead. With Keyhole Markup Language on Google Earth scientists were able to trace the course of the disease over the past decade.
The Google Earth project animates the spread of avian flu virus. In addition the data contains information on all known strains of the evolving flu virus plus all its host organisms. So far avian flu has not proven highly contagious among humans with fewer than 300 known cases worldwide. However, medical research is watching the virus's spread and evolution.
To check out the virus virtually, you need Google Earth downloaded. Then copy this link into your browser.
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