Wiki for A Killer Flu

I am happy to report that the wiki I suggested the writers of Effect Measure put up in my post On Borrowed Time has been up now for about a week under the instigation of bloggers at Effect Measure, The Next Hurrah and Just a Bump in the Beltway. 

The Flu Wiki is a wonderful experiment in collaborative problem solving in public health and self-reliance.

A Wiki is a form of collaborative software that allows anyone to edit (change) any page on the site using a standard web browser like Explorer, Firefox or Safari.The purpose of the Flu Wiki is to help local communities prepare for and perhaps cope with a possible influenza pandemic. This is a task previously ceded to local, state and national governmental public health agencies. Communications technology has now become sufficiently available to allow a new form of collaborative problem-solving that harvests the rich fund of knowledge and experience that exists among those connected via the internet, allowing more talent to participate.

Already there have been 23,000 page views with contributions from scientists, epidemiologists, sociologists et al according to the DemFromCT, the contributor from the Next Hurrah.

Declan Butler emailed me from Paris as soon as it went up.  He's the senior reporter for Nature magazine and the author of the fictional blog that first alerted me to the danger.  It's still the best piece for imagining what it will be like when a pandemic breaks out.

If you can contribute do so.  Otherwise, just read so you know what's happening and what's not.    Here's some other links to get you up to speed.

From Trust for America’s Health, June 2005,  A Killer Flu, which projects over half a million Americans could die and 2.3 million could be hospitalized if a moderately severe strain of a pandemic flu virus hits the United States.

In Foreign Affairs, July-August, 2005, The Next Pandemic, by Laurie Garrett.  If the H5N1 virus becomes "capable of human-to-human transmission and retains its extraordinary potency, humanity could face a pandemic unlike any ever witnessed."

Avian Flu blog - What we need to know