A Complete Guide to Hunting the Bird Flu Online

Feature | robin, January 16th, 2006

To accompany Tuesday’s show on virus hunters, here’s a complete guide to the best avian flu writing and sleuthing on the web.

For one-stop bird flu shopping, check out the amazing Flu Wiki (its logo is a hybrid flu virus/Wikipedia emblem). The collaborative website has more than 1000 pages of content available in English, French, Spanish, and now, Turkish. Its mission, “to help local communities prepare for and perhaps cope with a possible influenza pandemic,” seems to express an increasingly common sentiment – that the government isn’t going to take care of us, so we have to take care of ourselves.

If you want to ask the experts, Dr. Tara C. Smith writes the science blog Aetiology, and has an impressive five-part series on the bird flu. (Scroll down the main page to see all 5 parts on the far right).

Got H5N1? [H5N1Wear]

Effect Measure is written and edited anonymously by several scientists who each call themselves “Revere” on the blog (“The pandemic is coming! The pandemic is coming!” perhaps?). The site is authoritative, and a little scary. The authors claim to be famous in the public health community, and they are none too impressed with present government efforts to prepare the country’s health infrastructure for a possible pandemic. If you’re confused about the headlines, these scientists will help you parse the news. Start with this entry on the long view of vaccination. “Revere” is also a founder of the Flu Wiki.

Dr. Henry Niman follows bird flu at Recombinomics, so-named for the process by which a virus swaps genetic pieces with other strains of virus to form new strains. He’s been following the bird flu as it pops up in different places, tracing the specifics of the genetic code. His writing is a little on the technical side, but is more in-depth than your average news story.

In search of citizen trackers? Two great sources of lay information are B.J. Fischer’s Influenza Pandemic and Crawford Kilian’s H5N1. Both patiently track the news offering bits and pieces of commentary. If you’re in the mood for talking back, go to the ultimate citizen forum, the message board, which takes shape at Avian Flu Talk.

The most prominent online feature related to bird flu is a million ads for the drug Tamiflu. According to its maker, La Roche Inc., when taken daily Tamiflu is 92% effective in preventing influenza.

Tamiflu targets one of the two major surface structures of the influenza virus…[which] is virtually the same in all common strains of influenza. If [this surface structure] is inhibited, the virus is not able to infect new cells.

Roche Press Release

Recent cases in Vietnam may call this assertion into question, but we hope to get a more detailed explanation of how the drug works from our scientists. Gotta wonder what La Roche’s stock is worth right now, eh?If you want to see just how much their stock is worth, you can track it here. From the looks of it, they’re on the up and up. Can’t say that’s too surprising.

If you want the the really really big picture, science and nature reporter Declan Butler used Google Earth to create a rough map of the major recent avian flu outbreaks. According to Declan:

One can zoom across the globe, to see where each site sits in relation to others, by expanding, and double-clicking, on the locations in the left-hand window of Google Earth.

Declan Butler on Flu Wiki

The clearest explanation and links of the project are up here on the Flu Wiki.

Finally, if you’ve got a black sense of humor, you’ll want to check out this delightfully tacky birdflu wear. Sadly, the “got Tamiflu?” line of products was removed after “very persuasive resquests” from attorneys at La Roche.