Swine flu

Swine flu: Everything you need to know about swine flu--and what to avoid

Inevitably, Twitter is atwitter with swine flu tweets of varying reliability. CNET's Larry Magid describes the authoritative swine flu tweets from the US Centers for Disease Control, along with warnings about regarding other swine flu tweets with caution. CNN also regards Twitter as a mixed blessing for swine flu info.

As I'm writing this, it's clear the media have gone overboard with the swine flu tale. No doubt people are grateful for a distraction from the world's economic crisis, but swine flu 24-7 is, at this point, generating unnecessary alarm. In the immortal words of Douglas Adams, Don't Panic.

You may, however, want to keep handy the following list of pretty reliable sources on swine flu. They will tell you when panic is appropriate.

Updates from the US Centers for Disease Control:

http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/

Updates from the World Health Organization, aimed largely at medical professionals:

http://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/en/index.html

The Washington Post's swine flu central, with some videos:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/health/swineflu/index.html?sid=ST2009042703878

The New York Times has a swine flu central too, with interactive graphics and videos:

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/influenza/swine_influenza/index.html

Yahoo News roundup of stories:

http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/search?p=swine+flu

Swine flu FAQs on About.com's Patient Empowerment pages:

http://patients.about.com/od/patientempowermentissues/a/swindflu2009.htm

And, also inevitably, Wikipedia already has an entry on the current outbreak. In fact, mysteriously, it has two entries. Expect constant changes here, not all of them trustworthy, and heed the Wikipedia caveat--and plea: "This article may require cleanup (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cleanup) to meet Wikipedia's quality standards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style). Please improve this article (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Swine_influenza&action=edit) if you can. (April 2009)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_influenza

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_H1N1_flu_outbreak