Swine flu, pigflu, H1N1 (as WHO now prefers), whatever-you-call-it

This is fast-breaking story if ever there was one, and it looks impossible from this perch to do any more than sample the coverage randomly. Web sites are updating stories hourly, even minutely. So what the Tracker will focus on in coming days are what might be called the metastories, the sidebars with information that’s a bit more durable.

One alarming sidebar that ought to be its own main story is David Brown’s excellent piece in the Washington Post saying that the outbreak reporting system set up after SARS six years ago didn’t work well this time. Brown says that once the outbreak was first recognized in Mexico City, it took 18 days for the world at large to hear about it. “By the time international authorities became fully aware of the outbreak,” Brown writes, “there were about 800 cases and at least 50 deaths, and the virus was unknowingly being carried into other countries.” It’s a long story and sure to trigger investigations.

Jessica Mintz at the AP has a related story saying that weeks before CDC and WHO issued their warnings a small Seattle startup “already had a hunch something was up.” It’s an Internet-based system that tracks blogs, chat rooms, Twitter feeds and other publicly available Internet forums for signs that people are talking about a disease outbreak. The company, called Veratect, even issued some alerts before the public health agencies did.

Google is trying something similar by compiling search terms it receives from specific locations. Google.org is publishing its findings for Mexico, which appear to have logged a peak of flu-related searches in January and February but at levels below those seen in previous years.

Lost in most of the coverage is any discussion of how bad it is for an individual to get swine…oops, I mean H1N1 flu? After all, ordinary flu kills several hundred thousand people every year, and we live with that. In 1968 the so-called Hong Kong flu killed about a million people. The Tracker, then working at the Detroit Free Press, recalls that pandemic as something we hoped not to catch but didn’t get all that exercised over. Maggie Fox at Reuters makes a good start on explaining these things in the reader-friendly Q&A form. We need more examples of this kind of thing in other outlets.

Tracker fans, if you spot good examples of flu metastories, please send links to the Tracker via the “Suggest Stories” button at the top of this page. Please put only one link in each suggestion because our software is set to reject anything more spamlike.