By Angela Gunn, Betanews
If everyone will just calm down for a few minutes, there's plenty of good information out there on what's happening with the swine flu. (Yes, it's more fun to freak out, and your humble reporter wishes to report that children of her acquaintance are already using breathless news reports concerning the flu to beg for a day off from school. Note to children: When operating in pairs, try to get your story straight re your symptoms. I digress.)
First rule: Remember that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data," and resist the urge to gorge on me-too mainstream coverage or strained local angles on the situation. Instead, get your propagation information from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control. Who's got a dedicated swine-flu page in place. So does the CDC, and they also have tips for keeping yourself and your overwrought friends and co-workers safer -- hand washing is recommendation #1. Their Travelers' Health page (on which the organization currently warns against nonessential travel to Mexico) is a good site for practical folk in any case. (WHO, by the way, advises no restriction of regular travel or closure of borders.)
If it's local news and alerts you want, go directly to your city or county public health department. Some areas, such as Seattle and Massachusetts, are offering updates by e-mail or RSS (though New York State is taking the yeah-right-that'll-scale phone-in approach).
If you simply must make yourself miserable, a couple of sites are mashing up Google Maps and various information sources. In the best, a biomedical researcher in Pittsburgh has been diligently updating his H1N1 Swine Flu mashup, which differentiates between suspected cases and those that are confirmed or probable, and indicates which have resulted in deaths. (Very few, frankly.) Don't just look at the pushpins -- click in. You'll see that some reports are far more tenuous than others; for instance, Russia's only case at this writing says that "airport recorded a temperature from 29-year-old passenger, arrived at Moscow airport Sheremetyevo flight from Mexico City with change in Paris." Wouldn't you feel silly getting your shorts in a bunch over "pandemic data" like that?
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009