Launch Of The Flu Wiki

(Note: Bush spoke. Yeah, I saw it. Popularity bump for a week with July 4 coming. Advice: Reassess July 5th.)

But now for a thank you. The Flu Wiki, launched by Just a Bump in the Beltway, The Next Hurrah and Effect Measure blogs, has been a modest success. Each of two days has averaged nearly 1500 visits and over 7500 page views, with an average 20 minutes per visitor! I want to thank everyone involved, including the blogs that kindly hosted our announcement.

For something different, I thought I'd post a couple of reviews of the site, which at this point is more of a framework than a realized vision.

Here's an excerpt from Confined Space:

Despite their reputation, however, some bloggers actually light a candle instead of spending all of their time just cursing the darkness. So, Just a Bump in the Beltway, The Next Hurrah and Effect Measure blogs have launched a new experiment in collaborative problem solving in public health, The Flu Wiki.

They obviously meant bloggers in the abstract, certainly not little ol' me, right? Well, as Kagro X always says, we're activists. So do something besides yell at the TV.

And even though there's less there than there will be, the Other Resources section is filling in nicely, including a chart of who's got a problem from the WHO.

And there is some excellent speculative work about what might happen in the Anticipated Comsequences and Solutions section.

From H5N1: A Vision Of Disaster:

The new Flu Wiki has already become a huge success, and no wonder. Among its other resources is the pandemic scenario described by CanadaSue. It is absolutely superb, a brilliant working-out of avian flu's implications for a medium-sized Canadian city.

As a science-fiction novelist, I admire her ability to anticipate the mundane details and to present them in concrete language. You'll read her fictional diary thinking, "Oh God, didn't think of that. Oh God, that too. And that!" She has clearly done her homework, basing her scenario on facts and extrapolating reasonably from those facts.

I will be surprised and disappointed if this portrait of a pandemic isn't picked up by the print media and circulated widely. Impatient Web surfers may not want to click through the whole long story, but it's worth the effort—and on paper it would be a literally compelling page-turner.

All in all, a good beginning. My immediate goal is to continue organizing the framework and adding in the state-by-state data. In the end, i certainly hope this is an unneccesary project. But then again...

 

Comments

[Abby]

You should really e-mail Matt Yglesias. He's freaked out about avian flu--remarkably so for a generalist.

[RonK, Seattle]

Even in skeletal form, very educational (not to mention, scary).