Steven D. Levitt, well-known in Japan for the book, "Freakonomics" ("ヤバい経済学" in Japanese), expects the Internet to be of great help for fighting pandemic.
What can we do to fight global pandemics? The single most powerful tool we have is probably the internet. Pandemics tend to start in remote locations. What we need is a way to extract the information from those places quickly to get a head start on keeping the epidemic tamed. The formal networks like the CDC do not seem to work all that well.
Great. I totally agree with it. And he describes Whoissick.org which allows people to post about their sickness, to search with zip code, to view on a map, etc. It looks very cool and really useful. But he also says:
I doubt, however, that I would want to bother to go tell Whoissick.org that I feel awful. Certainly if I was about to die from the bird flu, it would not be top of mind.
Certainly ;)
In the meanwhile, I've been really addicted to Twitter these days, where people only reply to the question, "What are you doing?".
I think that it must be tough for us to post about our sickness to such sites as Whoissick.org, when we're suffering from disease. It's just a little overreact.
But I'm sure that Twitter enables us to do so easily due to its simplicity and diversity of accessibility. Actually, when people get ill, they're twittering, "got a headache", "feel so bad", "I seem to catch a cold" or so. We may be twittering at that time we're about to dying.
"Folks! I'm about to die. Good-bye!"
No kidding.
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