Swine Flu/H1N1: The Best Blogs, Tweeters and Aggregators for Journalists to Follow
This week, I'm going to focus on the best bloggers, tweeters and online aggregators to help you stay abreast of developments in this year's biggest health stories: H1N1/swine flu and health reform.
Today's post highlights H1N1/swine flu, with more on health reform Thursday. This is by no means meant to be a comprehensive list and I welcome your comments on any resources particularly useful to journalists that I may have missed. You can also check out ReportingonHealth's general resources for covering H1N1/swine flu here.
AGGREGATORS
CIDRAP's Swine Flu page aggregates scientific and epidemiologic reports on the H1N1 pandemic, organized by date.
An interesting resource that's worth checking occasionally to get a global sense of H1N1/swine flu chatter and headlines is Alltop.com's Swine Flu aggregator. It brings together in a single page H1N1/swine flu-related headlines from major news outlets like the New York Times, ABC News and NPR, swine-flu tagged Wordpress blogs and updates and tweets from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
The Wall St. Journal's swine flu page, available to nonsubscribers, includes an interactive case map in its helpful compilation of its latest stories, grouped by topic (vaccines, economic impact, understanding the virus, opinion, etc). It's a bit easier to navigate than the New York Times' H1N1 aggregation page.
BLOGGERS
A group of anonymous public health scientists blogs candidly about H1N1 news and policy at Effect Measure. A must-read.
At the Virology Blog, Vincent Racaniello, Professor of Microbiology at Columbia University Medical Center, offers tutorials in basic virology and his expert take on media coverage of developments in swine flu science and policy. Not exactly light reading, but a good place to familiarize yourself with some of the basic science underlying seasonal and H1N1 influenza.
Avian Flu Diary now covers H1N1 and general pandemic flu issues. Based in Florida, blogger and retired paramedic Michael Coston has been covering emerging infectious diseases since 2005 and was selected to be part of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department's Pandemic Leadership Blog in 2007.
H5N1: News and Resources about Pandemic Influenza is written by a nonspecialist professional writer from Canada, but it's well-regarded as a frequently updated round-up of H1N1 news, with an international emphasis.
These folks on Twitter also are worth a follow:
Avian Pandemic Influenza Daily Digest: news from the federal government
FluTrackers, a group of volunteers dedicated to tracking various types of influenza around the world
CIDRAP (see above aggregator)
Helen Branswell, considered one of the best reporters covering pandemic flu