At 6:48 a.m. on April 22, 2009, a leading flu blogger named "Revere" posted the first warning about a remarkable bit of news he'd spotted in a routine weekly report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. With what he labeled "an element of luck," the CDC had discovered a novel swine flu virus in two San Diego-area children.
Within 33 hours, CDC officials were telling excited reporters that human transmission had been detected in California and Texas. It wasn't the H5N1 bird flu whose gory onset had been anticipated for years by Internet health activists, but swine flu was scary.
To have played such a key role in detecting the emergence of a deadly global virus thrilled the worldwide virtual community known as "Flublogia," whose members use social media to track influenza and other infectious agents that range from KPC bacteria to Chikungunya.
The excitement didn't last. When swine flu turned into something of a nonevent (except for the mostly young victims whose lungs turned to pulp), fatigue inexorably gripped Flublogia. Less than 11 months after he had broken the news of the outbreak, Revere (who turned out to be a pseudonymous group of public health professionals led by a Boston epidemiologist) became the first of many flu bloggers to sign off.
"The Reveres' retirement left a gaping hole in Flublogia," recalls Mike Coston, a former paramedic and emergency preparedness firebrand who has blogged at Avian Flu Diary since early 2006. Like many surviving bloggers, Coston was drawn to the subject of infectious diseases by H5N1, the avian flu virus that most experts still consider the world No. 1 infectious-disease threat.
Coston rises at 4 a.m. daily to conduct research and write until midday, resuming work in the evening. He posts news, analysis, and historical context backed with links about a world of microbial menaces, drawing on the work of "dozens of news hounds" who crowdsource disease surveillance at a bustling bulletin board called FluTrackers. Posting in thousands of the site's forums and sub-forums, they track down, translate, and post alarming health developments drawn from local newspapers and obscure scientific journals.
Few outbreaks, anywhere, go undetected in Flublogia.
The community's reward has been Contagion -- a hit movie about a killer virus that exalts science and public health professionals, in part by pitting them against an evil blogger who looks like Julian Assange with bad teeth. Contagion's young villain pitches bogus antivirals on his vast Internet platform and even provokes a crusty scientist to dismiss blogging as "graffiti with punctuation."
As someone who's about to issue a novel about a do-it-yourself flu blogger's struggle to survive an avian flu pandemic in New York's East Village, I was modestly affronted when I saw the movie. My architect-blogger in American Fever: A Tale of Romance & Pestilence is fictitious, but he and his knowledge base emerged from years of serious research, much of which I've conducted on flu blogs.
What, I've been wondering, do the real flu bloggers -- who don't even accept advertising on their well-traveled sites, lest an ad for Tamiflu sap their credibility by popping up next to a story on antivirals -- think of Contagion's greedy Alan Krumwiede?
"I thought he was a caricature," says Crawford Killian, a retired business-writing teacher and novelist in Vancouver who serves as Flublogia's unofficial dean and longest-running contributor via his popular site, H5N1. "I know there are a lot of very strange people out there, blogging their brains out. But for a guy making $4 million, [Krumwiede] seemed to be operating solo -- 12 million hits per day and he's sticking posters under windshield wipers?"
"Part of me was slightly insulted," says Coston, who likes the movie. "But there are a number of conspiratorial antivaccine bloggers out there that are in some ways close to that." Indeed, a popular antivaccine site called NaturalNews.com greeted Contagion by warning visitors: "Hollywood begins mass brainwashing campaign to get people ready for the next bioengineered virus release."
"These nuts exist and the Internet gives them an audience and microphone," says Scott McPherson, chief information officer at the Florida House of Representatives and host of Scott McPherson's Web Presence, an IT-and-infrastructure-oriented flu blog. Calling the Krumwiede character "a 21st century snake-oil salesman," he hails Contagion as "an intelligently written movie. I particularly liked the fact that the feds decided to shut him down."
"The majority of us didn't like the movie, didn't find it hard-hitting enough," says Cottontop, an upstate New York mother of two who posts on the Flu Wiki bulletin board and blogs at her Flu News Network. As for Contagion's Krumwiede, she says: "We are not like that. Flu forums and flu blogs are 24-hour public health services -- first responders to getting the news out."
Bestselling author Laurie Garrett (The Coming Plague, I Heard the Sirens Scream), who as a paid consultant contributed a lot of ideas to more than 30 drafts for Contagion's screenplay, says that Krumwiede's character was inspired by her shock at seeing how many people posted false information about "life and death matters" during the swine flu pandemic.
Still, says Garrett, "there's a whole bunch of very good blog sites. You can't believe people have the time to do all this." As she and Contagion screenwriter Scott Z. Burns worked hard to whip up the movie's MEV-1 bat virus, she was tracking Flublogia. "Revere was way ahead of the curve. You'd think: 'How did he find this out?' You have to admire the tenacity and the digging."
On the plus side, the flu bloggers -- who universally complain that gas, electricity, and food never runs out in Contagion -- agree that the movie has spurred interest in their work. McPherson, who until recently hadn't blogged much about flu for more than a year, says he's "fired back up again," with five posts in various stages of development.
"My blog has picked up a lot of new people since Contagion," says Cottontop. "And the number of Indonesians reading it and going to Flu Wiki has really picked up, too. Something's going on over there with H5N1."
Follow Peter Christian Hall on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@PeterChristHal
when WHO did announce that the Mexican cases were linked to the same virus.
Flublogia never sleeps.
Best, Peter
http://cottontopssandbox.wordpress.com/2011/10/
They all post to PFI www.singtomeohmuse.com when things get hot where in depth analysis takes place.
Actual Doctors and public health specialists working to protect people not push the "conspiracy" agenda.
If you trust your health to the tinfoil hat brigade, you do yourself no favors.
Here's the Flu Resources Page at my novel's website, which contains links to all of these sites and more, including outstanding books: http://www.americanfeverbook.com/flu-resources/
Crawford Killian at H5N1 posts a lot of well-chosen news, sometimes with comment; that's Cottontop's approach, though less comprehensively; Scott McPherson posts occasionally—mostly on matters that keenly interest him, which could range from perils to our infrastructure to upstart theories on flu transmission; and Mike Coston offers current items with analysis and background.
If you wish to check in occasionally, I'd say Coston's Avian Flu Diary is a very good site to visit.
One I didn't mention is Maryn McKenna's Superbug at Wired, a great site about a lot of things. (She wrote the book on MRSA.) And CIDRAP at University of Minnesota is an amazing, comprehensive, current resource (http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/index.html). Then there's Arkanoid Legent in Malaysia...!
And the flu boards at Flu Trackers and Flu Wiki are great resources, too!
Enjoy, Peter
CDC follows WHO. The director of WHO is PRC sponsored. Connect the dots.
It should be asked each and every time anybody says a word.
Might just weed out those paid by the CDC, by the People's Republic of China and its agents.
Might just.
It's called "disclosure."
It'll all come out in the wash, eventually. Much of it won't be pretty.
And truly, the "writer/director" missed the more fascinating story.
The idea of being paid by the CDC or the People's Republic of China is ludicrous. We perennially complain about official silence from such agencies and countries, and about the spin they put on the data they do release. (Full disclosure: I did receive payment from the PRC as a "foreign expert" English teacher for five months in 1983; it was not a munificent sum, and I am not nostalgic about my temporary employer.)
The really fascinating story for me about Flublogia is that a few persons will take the time and trouble to explore the web and retrieve stories about epidemics in places no one ever heard of--simply because they're interested in public-health issues and how different societies respond to such outbreaks.
If we were out to make money, we'd do far better peddling online snake oil to American hypochondriacs.
Fortunately, Crof is not one of those operatives, nor are a few others here. PFI is by no means immune, but we hold the line here (with some difficulty on some days), and thus end up being less than "all in" as are some other major sites that are rife with CDC, WHO, PRC, and just one-degree-removed professional "risk communicator" activities on behalf of those clients.
Believe me, Crof, when I wandered into this field in 2006 it's the last thing I would have expected too, but I was naive.
I understand completely that its folks -- like Crof -- who are *not* Borged who are the first ones to logically assume that everyone else is just like them. I get that. But that's not reality, nor is it realpolitik.
Crof and others who truly think that flublogia is as pure as the driven snow need to step back and consider how the PRC acts with regard to every single other issue of national security it encounters. They might also take an honest look at the lengths the CDC, with its new emphasis on media (accompanied by exorbitant funding for same), has taken to command and control "risk communications," particularly on sensitive pandemic issues.
Entities that allow everyone to think they are independent sometimes simply aren't. They might have been at one time, but things change. Those regular "volunteers" you see are sometimes salaried pros (not all, but some, and some noted and indeed very regular ones).