An article from the Washington Post published on September 2nd 2009 deals with technology and new forms of Internet social interaction as powerful tools that are transforming how influenza outbreaks are monitored.The article contains an interview to Alessandro Vespignani, professor of Informatics at Indiana University and coordinator of the Epiwork project. “All these things really change the way that we can manage diseases,” said Alessandro Vespignani. “It’s not just . . . a passive approach, where we just wait for the disease and then try to do something.”

The article mentions also “flu watcher” programs in which volunteers report their health conditions weekly via the Internet citing the case of Italy, the Netherlands, Britain and other countries, with tens of thousands of volunteers.

The opening of the UK IMS platform has been a success since the very beginning.

Registration for the the UK Flu Survey began in the middle of July. By noon on July 27th, over 4400 users had registered at flusurvey.org.uk, with the greatest number of user registrations taking place on July 21st.

John Edmunds, leader of the UK team, commented this remarkable achievement:” We launched it on a Thursday afternoon, and e-mailed all our friends and family and asked them to log on and to tell others. By the end of the Thursday we had a few hundred participants, and by the time the press looked at the site we had 500-600 participants. So it already looked quite impressive. Then, we had a surge of interest which brought us up to the 4000 mark.”

The internet has been used to monitor patterns of influenza-like-illness (ILI) in the Netherlands and Belgium since 2003, in Portugal since 2005 and Italy since 2007. The UK flu survey extends this system to the UK. The platform has just been launched and its depletion is one of the tasks of Epiwork WP 5. So far, almost 400 volunteers are participating. Everybody living in the UK can register here and start participating.

The UK platform is also the first IMS that implemented a Contact Survey to detect contact patterns data among the volunteers.

This survey has been developed by researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). The LSHTM is the UK’s national school of public health training and research and is found in Bloomsbury, London, near the British Museum.