MindSpinner

I didn’t write a blog post last weekend because I was drafting pandemic flu flyers instead, for very limited distribution in my town. The copy was distilled from Flu Wiki’s materials for Pandemic Flu Awareness Week and information at pandemicflu.gov. I just can’t stand it that people all around me here have no clue that a pandemic is a very real possibility and are thus in no way preparing. In the course of less than a week, those flu flyers have been adapted for different audiences and locales in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. They’ve been been viewed online hundreds of times; thousands of copies have been made; versions are even finding their way, with much able help, into a few newspapers here and there, potentially extending their reach to several millions.

I had not grasped the potential that people working together through the Internet have for effecting such feats. I sat down last Sunday morning, cross-legged on my bed, determined only to do a small useful thing in my town and in my neighborhood and, as an additional step, sought feedback and posted a link to the flyer in the discussion forum on Flu Wiki. Flu Wiki itself began with a small group of individuals who envisioned the Wiki as means by which people could put their heads together, solve problems, educate the public, and encourage preparedness.

In view of the week’s events, I cannot help but think of Gandalf’s words to Bilbo Baggins at the end of The Hobbit, “You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!” I’ve never thought of myself as being anything other than “quite a little fellow.” That entirely suites my somewhat retiring personality.

Though Bilbo was grateful to hear Gandalf say this, it is becoming ever clearer that the world needs a lot of little fellows to do what they can. Apparently, the Director of the CDC agrees. In a recent post entitled “This blog can save your life!,” Jay Bernhardt considers the role of the new media in raising public awareness of health issues. Here is an excerpt:

Above and beyond real-time information gathering and message dissemination, the social and community qualities of new media can advance health and risk communication by changing how we understand our problems and how we construct our solutions. News groups, chat rooms, and bulletin boards have been used for exchanging health information and as online support groups since the earliest days of the web. Today’s Web 2.0 tools that leverage and harness the “knowledge of the crowd” offer great potential for solving our most difficult public health problems and building and empowering communities of change. One great example is FluWiki, whose stated purpose is “to help local communities prepare for and perhaps cope with a possible influenza pandemic, [which is] a task previously ceded to local, state and national governmental public health agencies.”

Controlling and mitigating public health emergencies, especially those that are the size and scale of an influenza pandemic, will absolutely require the active engagement and participation of the public and all sectors of society. New media efforts to engage and galvanize the public like FluWiki, Green Hammer, and the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog are critical to CDC’s ability to prepare for and respond to an influenza pandemic and to other possible public health emergencies.

Flu Wiki is, as far as I can tell, the most active pandemic flu-related community, though it is hardly the only laudable pandemic flu forum, and several excellent blogs focus regularly on H5N1 news. Any one person doing what he or she can makes a difference. Any group working together multiplies results many times over.

One might wish, however, that the biggest fellows, for their part, would do more, and in a timely manner. Too many of those flyers, paid for by volunteers and vastly insufficient in number, will end up in the trash, tossed there by people who are waiting for a clearer, louder, official word which may well come too late. No one can say precisely when a pandemic will emerge, but we are surely standing at the brink, peering into a tragic probability.