Disease intelligence in a Twitter world
The following is a guest blog post that I wrote for a friend’s blog (now defunct) in 2009. At the time, I was one year into my PhD and the swine-origin H1N1 influenza virus pandemic was just beginning. I was cleaning through some old files and found it today, and thought it would be an interesting “time capsule” to share with the world. I don’t want to disrupt the flow of the piece, but I’ve added some footnotes that give commentary on what I think of my 11-year-old predictions today.
Swine flu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_outbreak). If you have a television, computer, or live near a news stand, you’ve heard about this new virus. If you’re in the media, you’ve been running the story into the ground. If you’re in the study of biomedical virology, as I am, you’ve had a very different perspective on this virus than most of the general public.
Most of us in science have just been interested in how the virus arose and the genetic lineage it has. Its (pathogenicity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathogenicity)—i.e., how severe an illness it causes — was never very high, and as soon as influenza researchers saw its gene sequence, they realized it lacked some of the major markers for virulence. This means scientists have spent most of our time telling people to calm down and go about their lives. A far cry from US Vice President Joe Biden and…
