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Previous Volume 360:2156 May 21, 2009 Number 21 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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The value of Web-based information for early disease detection, public health monitoring, and risk communication has never been as evident as it is today, given the emergence of the current influenza A (H1N1) virus. Many ongoing efforts have underscored the important roles that Internet and social-media tools are playing in the detection of and response to this outbreak.

In March and early April, while much of the world was focusing on the threat of avian influenza originating in Asia, intelligence-gathering systems were also extracting evidence of an epidemic of acute respiratory infections in Mexico. Early informal reports from the Mexican . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Source Information

Dr. Brownstein is a faculty member at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program, Children's Hospital Boston, and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, Boston. Mr. Freifeld is a research software developer at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program in Boston and a master's candidate in the New Media Medicine Group of the MIT Media Laboratory in Cambridge, MA. Dr. Brownstein and Mr. Freifeld are the cocreators of the HealthMap system. Dr. Madoff is a professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, an infectious disease physician with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Boston, and editor of ProMED-mail, a program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases.

This article (10.1056/NEJMp0904012) was published at NEJM.org on May 7, 2009.

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